What is beauty? Who decides what beauty is?
A beautiful place make people coming back to it. Look how many tourists visit Florence in Italy vs Florence in SC.
So this is obviously a very important subject matter but the host doesnt come out as being so relatable. He gives the impression of knowing it all and just preaching what he knows as being absolutely correct. Yes, of course, he speaks very well. He is cordial and has a neat sense of humor
and yes I'd say he's right: a "contemporary artist" goal is to shutter moral taboos and become famous doing so.
I don't completely agree with the statement that spiritual values have been dismissed and replaced with materialism, the idea that "art" today is just a monetary investment. It was similar during the peak of Renaissance, art was currency, artists were prized players like in today's sports. Then yes, artists in the past had faith in the divine, but the church was paying good money to have those artwork done, so I guess the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Other complaints I have:
- there is just too much to digest: paintings, architecture, sculptures, music...
- everything is centered around Western civilization. They should have expressed this point of view clearly at the beginning
- historical ideologies that gained popularity at the end of 1800s and beginning of 1900s are not mentioned... those have played a crucial role in shaping human thinking and then the arts.
So overall: if you understand why beauty matters, you won't get much out of this documentary. If you think that so-called contemporary modern art is perfectly fine you won't change much.
This should have been a docuseries.
