Beauty, in brain of beholder

Never trust a television show that contains a statement like this: “These are absolutely the best statues ever made.” Enthusiasms, not to mention faith in critical art evaluations, are one thing, but absolute judgments are another.

What they are, simply, is bunk. The best statues? Ever?

The sensationalist statement turns up near the end of the grueling first hour of “How Art Made the World,” a five-part series co-produced by KCET and the BBC (and shown in Britain last year) that launches tonight at 10 on PBS, airing on consecutive Mondays.

Here’s an explanation for the blowzy gaffe: The series’ actual theme, based on the two episodes made available for preview, turns out to be something that isn’t exactly art.

The “absolutely ... best statues ever made” are the Riace bronzes, a magnificently crafted pair of 5th century BC Greek warrior figures famously discovered at the bottom of the Ionian sea in 1972 by a vacationing Roman chemist. Apparently, in the last 2,450 years or so, it’s all been downhill for statuary.

The figures’ elongated limbs, razor sharp linear detailing and distorted anatomical features combine to create a mannerist display of imposing, even intimidating sculptural bravura. Strange and powerful abstractions of the human form, they are certainly wonderful. Our genial if pontifical host, Cambridge University classics lecturer Nigel Spivey, claims to know why.

The reason for artistic distortion from the actual human bodily norm remains the same throughout history, Spivey says. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about the enormous breasts and buttocks on a 25,000-year-old carved stone fetish figurine, like the tiny Venus of Willendorf; or a bluntly primitivist 1925 carving by Henry Moore, which looks Mesoamerican; or even an impossibly sleek nose job on a 25-year-old fashion model. In every case, the human brain is simply hard-wired to want to exaggerate, alter and otherwise misquote the ordinary human form. And there’s nothing to be done about it.

The show’s theme is less art than brain chemistry -- “How Dopamine Made the World,” as it were. Oddly reductive, and maybe even vaguely true (but so what?), this prescription is applied to the first two episodes.

“More Human Than Human” is a flashy look at the long history of artistic bodily images that forgo strict realism, from the pyramids to Picasso. “The Day Pictures Were Born” examines the sudden “creative explosion” that happened in prehistoric European cave paintings -- art’s Big Bang -- and in South African and North American rock art. Those pictures emerged from their makers’ chemically altered brain patterns.

The show considers how the ingestion of mind-altering drugs, exhausting tribal rituals and other sensory deprivation or enhancement create hallucinations. Speculation is that these inner visions are in turn what’s represented on the walls of caves or the sides of cliffs. It’s the prehistoric back story to “Ecstasy: In and About Altered States,” the international survey of contemporary artists exploring alternative modes of perception that was at the Museum of Contemporary Art last fall.

The most moving section records a late night “trance dance” around a bonfire in a contemporary Namibian village. The shaman (and the villagers) believes he travels to the spirit world during his rhythmically induced rapture. The spectral visions that well up during his, er, trip -- his chemically altered consciousness -- are proposed to be similar to what happened with anonymous cave dwellers 35,000 years ago.

“The Day Pictures Were Born” is the more compelling and convincing of the two episodes, partly because the bombastic, digitally jazzy special effects that disfigure the first episode are toned way down. (So is the volume.) You don’t feel like a potential victim of a magician’s distraction, with your wristwatch being swiped while you’re focused on the card trick.

Instead, a mostly straightforward discussion of cave painting meets a clear and concise survey of scholarly attempts to interpret the meanings of the mysteriously beautiful animal and abstract images in Altamira, Spain; Lascaux, France; the Southern California deserts; and elsewhere.

The program is illustrated by location visits and only a few hokey docudrama fabrications -- innocent little girl wanders into cave, makes shattering discovery, you are there!

The TV-spirit world of episode two doesn’t break new ground, but it does manage to popularize a highly specialized -- and speculative -- field. Faith in the material, partly manifested by a reined-in sensationalism, keeps the focus where it belongs. I wouldn’t say the oxen at Lascaux and the deer at Altamira are absolutely the best paintings ever made, but they’re astounding nonetheless.

*

‘How Art Made the World’

Where: KCET

When: 10 to 11 tonight

Rating: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)