Thirty odd years ago, Kenneth Clark made a famous documentary for the BBC called Civilisation. It is marvellous to watch now, for all his un-PC comments, not least since when Clark talks about a picture or a building the camera trains on the picture or building, not Clark looking at the picture or building, as would happen in documentary filming now. It is as if there was then a confidence in the art: it could stand up on its own and not need the prop of a presenter appreciating how grand or significant it is.

However, that confidence was being eroded even as he filmed. For Clark's general message was negative: our civilisation is under threat as the civilising capacities of religion are undermined by the processes of modernity.

Art critic Matthew Collings has now made a new series, This Is Civilisation. The first part was broadcast last Saturday, he has written about it in the Observer, and talked about it today on the radio. I do not know what his religious convictions might be, probably agnostic if not atheistic: in the episode I've seen he expresses scepticism about the historicity of Jesus. What is interesting though is that, Collings believes that art of the past and, in a more distant way, of the present is founded in a religious impulse: even humanistic art since the 18th century invokes the aura explicit in earlier religious art; it quotes from religious art to gain authority. He continues:

Once the religious structure of life is removed, even if temporarily, what is there for art to do? And I say that what you have once God is removed from this philosophical equation is human beings, and what human beings have that God doesn't have is human feeling.

So art becomes the business of expressing human feeling - perhaps in the direction of nobility like the paintings of David, or in the direction of subterranean depths like the paintings of Goya. But the change does not stop there, for the deeper question Collings raises is whether the exclusively human, borrowing echoes of a religious past, is enough? Why this might be thought a problem is that in the years since David and Goya something further has happened to bring about what now might be called the quintessence of contemporary art - a gleeful, giddy, slightly menacing, slightly amusing fun. But, Collings asks:

Is fun all that we want from art? We want something a bit more important and profound and deep but we're not sure if we deserve to have it. So we've had a culture of maybe forty or fifty years of art leading more and more to the present moment when we've got a great celebration of a kind of silliness on the one hand and pretentiousness on the other hand and entertainment down the middle, and an absolute leaving off the stage of anything important, profound, meaningful or deep...

I spent five minutes with (Damian Hirst's skull) and it didn't reward me very much.

In short, though Collings is very a different kind of human being from Clark (and a very different presenter: the unmediated seriousness of Clark comes at us with an ironic tone from Collings, and even when the camera trains on the art it can't stay still), they identify a pretty similar issue: the history of modern art raisings the contemporary crisis of transcendence for the West. Collings continues:

In the future I hope that we will have a more refined and sensitive approach to art so that we don't demand that it is only marketing... What we have now is a kind of advertisingism... The artists represent all of us, just as the Greek artists who carved gods in marble or bronze or wood represented Greek culture. We don't have any positive narrative or myth of the future. As a culture, we accept more than we perhaps realise, a spirit of futility. So it is perhaps not surprising that the art that represents us does it in an ironic, comedic mode.

It'll be interesting to see what more Collings makes of this as the series progresses. A clue comes from the blurb for the third programme, on nature and, in particular Ruskin: 'Ruskin is one of CollingsĀ’ heroes. He believed that art could save our souls. It could reconnect us with nature, and heal the spiritual wasteland created by industrialisation.'

Though the final programme ends with a question: 'When we look at the art that our times have produced, should we feel optimistic or pessimistic about the future of civilisation?' Clark's question persists...