In our current society, art has been effectively sidelined, relegated to the margins of public consciousness. It has been pushed into a corner where it functions either as a high-priced “trophy” at Sotheby’s and Christie’s auctions—a mere asset class for the ultra-wealthy—or as a five-second, distraction on a digital feed.
This is a staggering decline from the era of the Renaissance, when a city like Florence directed between 5% and 10% of its total economic output toward art and architecture. Back then, beauty was a civic necessity, a spiritual mandate, and a projection of political power; today, despite our unprecedented global wealth, most developed nations spend a pathetic fraction of that—often less than 0.05% of GDP.
It is tempting to blame this atrophy on the artists themselves, arguing they have nothing left of importance to say. Certainly, platforms like Instagram are drowning in a sea of “artists” churning out aesthetic wallpaper and mindless “content” designed for the algorithm. But the real culpability lies with the art historians and the museums. They have professionalized the wonder out of the work, turning museums into sterile tourist attractions designed primarily to ensure you “exit through the gift shop.” By transforming what should be a visceral, life-altering encounter into a clinical chore, they have killed the art they claim to protect. A man standing in front of a masterpiece droning on about “brushstroke technique” is the reason the next generation views a gallery visit not as an exciting adventure, but as a form of detention.
Simon Schama’s “Headlock”
Simon Schama’s Power of Art was a loud, aggressive rejection of that boring, hushed-reverence style of history. Schama’s whole point is that great art has “dreadful manners.” It doesn’t want your polite interest; it wants to grab you in a headlock, rough you up, and rearrange your sense of reality. In the episodes on Jacques-Louis David, Picasso, and Rothko, he shows us art not as decoration, but as a live wire. He doesn’t want you to look at a painting; he wants you to survive it.
Jacques-Louis David: The Artistic Hitman
Schama doesn’t just talk about David’s “Neoclassicism”—he talks about a man who was essentially the PR agent for the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. In The Death of Marat, David took a radical journalist with a skin disease and turned him into a secular Christ. Schama focuses on the terrifying, cold vacuum of the painting, showing how David used beauty to make a political assassination look like a holy sacrifice. It’s art used as a weapon, and it’s deeply uncomfortable because it forces the viewer to acknowledge how easily genius can be harnessed for propaganda.
Pablo Picasso: Witness to a Massacre
With Picasso’s Guernica, Schama shows us the moment a self-absorbed celebrity artist finally realized his work had to do something more than be “clever.” He explains the black-and-white palette not as a stylistic quirk, but as a refusal to give the viewer any decorative “pretty” colors to enjoy while looking at a massacre. He treats the painting as a “bombing in reverse,” a jagged explosion of grief that forces us to stop “taking violent evil in our stride.” Picasso weaponizes the vocabulary of abstraction—the fragmented bodies, the collapsed perspective, the sharp, industrial lines—not to show off a new “style,” but to make us question the very foundations of modern life. It is a complete rejection of the idea that modernism is just about shapes and colors; here, it is about the moral responsibility of the witness. By using the jagged language of the new century to depict a tragedy, Picasso forces us to confront the dark side of technological progress and the failure of the Enlightenment’s promise of rational peace.
Mark Rothko: A Final Stand for Silence
The Rothko episode is Schama at his most intense, following the artist’s journey to the Seagram Murals—paintings intended for a luxury restaurant that Rothko eventually yanked because he didn’t want the “over-privileged” eating in front of them. To Schama, these aren’t “abstract” blobs; they are portals to tragedy and ecstasy. He argues that Rothko’s power is in his demand for silence. He didn’t want you to “appreciate” the painting; he wanted you to be consumed by it, creating a secular chapel where the viewer is forced into a confrontation with their own mortality. Schama sees in these tonal expanses a cinematic quality akin to the monolith in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Just as Kubrick used the vastness of space to provoke a sense of awe and terror about the future of the species, Rothko uses his massive canvases to evoke the sheer weight of human life suspended in the infinite. It is a profound, cosmic wonder—a feeling of being small in the face of the absolute—that Rothko demands we feel through his vibrating layers of color.
If Museums Required Mental Preparation
If museums actually followed Schama’s lead, they would stop being “tourist attractions” and start acting like “initiation rites.” Currently, the museum experience is designed for the lowest common denominator—the person who walks in, stands in front of the Oath of the Horatii, flashes an idiotic peace sign while their videographer takes a picture for the grid, and they leave to repeat the same thing using the cafe as the new background. A Schamian museum would view that as an act of desecration.
Instead of an open-door policy for the casual Instagrammer, a Schamian museum might require six weeks of intensive mental preparation before you are even allowed into the David gallery. You’d have to study the Jacobin mandates, feel the heat of the guillotine, and understand the specific, blood-soaked stakes of the 1790s. The museum wouldn’t be a place for a “glamorous photo-op”; it would be a place you earned the right to enter. By the time you finally stood in front of the canvas, you wouldn’t be taking a selfie; you’d be catching your breath.
If Art History Lectures Used the Schama Method
In the classroom, Schama’s approach would replace the boring slide-show with a forensic investigation into the artist’s motives. Take Caravaggio: the lecture wouldn’t be about Tenebrism; it would be about a fugitive murderer painting his own severed head as Goliath to beg for a papal pardon. The teacher wouldn’t provide the answer; they would present the artist’s biography and the blood-soaked canvas, forcing the students to realize that the face of the giant is actually a self-portrait. Only after this realization is established would the concept of the mea culpa be introduced—the painting as a literal confession of guilt and a plea for life. This isn’t an “anything goes” subjective free-all—in a Schamian classroom, not all opinions are equal. A student’s reaction is only valid if it is rooted in the “muck and the bullets” of the history. The question isn’t “How do you feel?” but “Why does Caravaggio’s desperation make this specific self-portrait feel like a scream?” By shifting the focus from formal technique to the visceral “why,” the teacher ensures the painting remains a live wire rather than a dead specimen.
Conclusion: The Historian as Dramatist
Schama’s Power of Art reminds us that art isn’t meant to match the sofa; it’s meant to wreck the room. By treating David, Picasso, and Rothko as fighters in a high-stakes psychological drama, he proves that art history is only boring if the people telling it have lost their own sense of wonder. If we want art to matter again, we have to stop treating museums like playgrounds and start treating them like the dangerous arenas they are—spaces for the most profound, uncomfortable, and transformative human ideas.