Customer Rating:  
Summary: Applause, but a Good Kick in the Rear to Schama for Failing to List Music Credits
Comment: No doubt many are wondering: what was that haunting counter-tenor aria floating through the David episode: Vivaldi's Nisi Dominus in G Minor, RV 608: IV. In fact, there are a number of exceptional musical works that make up the soundtrack of this series, and that you should have to wonder what they are without mention of them in the credits is annoying. Mr. Schama's and his producer's failure to list music credits for each of the shows in the Power of Art, brilliant though the series was, was a grotesque oversight and they ought to be read the riot act. How such smart people could make so egregious and stupid an error as overlooking the power of the music they obviously spent so much time and attention selecting is beyond me. Quite infuriating! Details like these matter. After all, Mr. Schama has made a career looking at the details. He should know better.
Customer Rating:
Summary: EYES OF ART
Comment: Once again Simon Schama does his thing and brings to life a whole other aspect in the magical world of art. I bought this for my mother who can be a difficult DVD watcher and a particular art amateur, being an artist in her own right. She just loved it !!!! Schama's approach and presentation is as captivating as ever with so much to think through that she limited her first viewing to the first two segments. She had to call me the next morning to tell me what a wonderful gift it was and that it had even drawn in my rather busy father from his schedule. That in it's self says it all for me !!!!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Schama Dumbs Down
Comment: It seems these days every British scholar's highest ambition is to be a TV star. Simon Schama, a historian best known for his excellent revisionist history of the French Revolution, has become a jack of all trades with series on "all" British history and now art. He provides some brilliant formal analyses, some less brilliant psychological analyses, and some real howlers.
In the Rothko segment he wildly overstates a half-century of American inflation: based on a conversion factor of .141 Rothko's $35,000 Four Seasons commission in 1954 was not worth "two and a half million" 2007 dollars but just under a tenth that amount. In the Caravaggio section he seems to think that Christians believe the Virgin never died (but is clearly delighted to "inform" them of her demise). The Bernini section belabors endlessly the displaced sexuality of his sculpture of Saint Teresa. This is hardly a revelation, and also somewhat reductive. Two days later I saw a performance by Michiko Uchida of Mozart; the same interpretation could have been applied to her rapt expression. Sex may be ecstatic, but all ecstacy is not necessarily sexual. Nonetheless, Schama, playing to the TV groundlings, is determined to include all the sex and violence he can conjure up, starting with the facile trope of paint as blood that introduces each segment.
Schama is presumably not responsible for another hoot in the Caravaggio section. He and his producers essentially turn this into a swashbuckler, complete with dueling scars. I use the plural advisedly, since in the course of the film the scar shifts miraculously from one cheek to the other. The Power of Art indeed!
Schama himself is no action hero but a more intellectual Austin Powers, bad teeth and goofy posture included. Perhaps his strained wit--he rattles off "hip" slang phrases (e.g., "Yeah, right") as proudly as if he were inventing them--has caused a hernia, or is it his very odd delivery (constantly inhaling deeply and puffing up his narrow chest, executing a kind of corkscrew with his shoulders and hips, etc.)? The gratuitous cameo appearance by his youthful self in the Rothko section is another example of a desperate need for attention, though, irrelevant as it may be, the scene of him in the kitchen suggests he knows how to cook.
Kudos to the actors playing Rothko and Van Gogh! Kudos to Schama for introducing the art to those who've never heard of it! So let's make it three-and-a-half stars for Simplifying Simon.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Power of Simon
Comment: Simon Schama's brilliant video "The Power of Art", like everything else he has done, is intellectually and aesthetically creative, original and convincing. He selects a significant group of artists across time and shows how their representative masterpieces defined an era and changed the way we look at the world. It is his special gift, the ability to think up an original thesis and articulate it clearly so that his viewers comprehend both the merits of the works and their impact on our lives. Schama has a special power and charisma in presentation, and yet he lets the works speak for themselves. For layman and professional alike, "The Power of Art" offers a way of understanding our world from a different perspective.
Customer Rating:
Summary: All lovers of beauty should see this lesson about art!
Comment: Whether we are art lovers or not, we should should own this or at least take advantage of the public broadcasting system which plays it periodically for everyone. You just might see someone that you already know.
|
