Kathryn Flett's review of Matthew Collings' Civilisation

Kathryn Flett
Sunday December 9, 2007
The Observer

This Is Civilisation C4

'What are we? Empty, unhinged, distorted ... A polluted modern landscape is like the polluted inner self ... [but] this feeling of catastrophe isn't really unique to modern life - tonight we're going to look at where it comes from, and what we can do about it...'

Holy Mary, Mother of Thingy, praise be to Buddha, Krishna and teddies of all faiths everywhere: Matthew Collings is back right where we need him, on Saturday nights at the front of the season of ill-will. For it was around mid-November and the 7,316th commercial break on Cartoon Network that my habitual Bah-humbuggery turned a dangerously 'toon-ish shade of bile.

Collings's This Is Civilisation (C4) is currently one of the very few bling-free zones on a Saturday night, and I am clinging to it like a lost polar bear on a drifting 'berg. Last Saturday it took us on a bedazzling journey through art's 18th century shift from predominantly religious imagery to the business of capturing emotions, via Goya, and Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Marat.

For somebody who channel-hopped from ITV to C4 at the precise moment when The X Factor had, even with the full deployment of critical irony, become completely unbearable (the terrifyingly banal sibling duo Same Difference was the tipping point), This Is Civilisation was almost too far in the opposite, unsequinned, unstupid, ungormlessly-gurning (ad breaks aside) direction to cope with. But by god it felt good to have to process thoughts very quickly, especially on a Saturday, which is mostly a doing rather than a thinking day.

By last night, Collings was hoping art might still have the power to save souls, the way Ruskin thought it could, at a time when it appeared the industrial revolution was attempting to steal them for ever. Ruskin was, according to Collings, the 'prophet of why art matters', and he spun out the theory in a deliriously brainy yet blokily colloquial fashion ('everyone thought Turner was a git ...' and, 'coming up after the ads, a big blast of consolation for humanity's lost illusions ...') for an entirely riveting hour.

Even if you didn't buy into the idea of the Renaissance as a plague on all our arthouses, as did Ruskin - who only approved of the gothic Doge's Palace side of St Mark's Square and considered the 16th-century library opposite to be a sterile slab of proto-Modernism - or believe Whistler's Nocturne in Blue and Gold to be 'throwing a pot of paint in the public's face', or consider Impressionism to be fluffy, entertaining, escapist but ultimately vacuous and therefore pretty much the Strictly Come Dancing of its day, by the end of This Is Civilisation it was impossible not to feel a tiny bit better about our empty, unhinged, distorted half-lives - and possibly more civilised.

'Ruskin's great lesson,' said Collings, finally, in that warm, intimate bedside manner ideal for soothing small children to sleep ('Hello, I'm Matthew and this is the CBeebies bedtime hour. Tonight's story is called Why Everybody Thought Turner Was a Git ...'), 'is not that medievalism is the answer, but that awakening consciousness of what is really going on is the answer. You don't have to be an art snob to find that important, you only have to be alive.'