WOW TV

Series

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  Matt's Old Masters

  6.00 3 videos for 6.00

  Matthew Collings takes a fresh look at Titian, Velazquez, Rubens and Hogarth, identifying a painterly stream of painters whose astonishing love and use of paint transcends the years that separate our modern sensibilities from theirs.

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  The Art Show

  0.00 8 videos for FREE

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  The Me Generation: Artists' Self Portraits

  4.00 2 videos for 4.00

  Artists' self portraits through the ages provide us with images of the Self, of what it is to be human, not just the look of people generally in different periods, but an intense sustained self-scrutiny.

  No one can exist in a void -- we recognise ourselves in other people. We get what we are from others. Even to feel isolated and apart -- we need a model for how to be that: we need a model for sulking. Identity is made up of bits: we're never quite sure which bit is the purest, the most wholly 'us'.

  A Renaissance self portrait is a marvel of believability. A more contemporary self portrait tends to be a puzzle of disconnections. More and more in our own times, artists' don't believe anything is really them, because there is very little belief in anything in contemporary art -- the main thing artists believe in now is suspicion.

  A Renaissance Self is centred. A post-Renaissance Self is doubtful, alone, trembling, seeing the void beyond all certainties, feeling that all certainties are illusions -- the only real thing is the doubting fearful outsider self. But a very modern Self is transparently unreal. Renaissance Selves don't need a profound inner Self because they are Selves defined by their connection to all sorts of powerful structures -- religion, politics, society.

  Post Renaissance Selves see through all those structures: they know they don't belong there -- they have great depths of inner-ness to compensate for being rejects from the crowd. While a very modern Self is a wholly sampled stapled-together collaged transparent construct -- a bit here, a bit there, one thing one day, different the next -- nothing within, all surface -- and not even worried or anxious about this, in fact perfectly OK about it.

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  What X Did For Me

  0.00 3 videos for FREE

  The idea of these films is to tell the life stories and evaluate the importance of the work of some of the biggest artists, writers and musicians through the opinions of some of the most acclaimed contemporary artists . So for the viewers it's a real treat - several great artists talking about their hero. This approach offers a completely original approach to biography whilst also offering a unique insight into the thinking of the next generation of painters and writers.