Nerd Alert

As if the spate of Harry Potter posting didn't tip you off, I'm going to seal the bargain: I am a nerd.

For the past few weeks, I've been watching Simon Schama's The Power of Art on PBS, which comes on a couple of hours after my mother's weekly dose of Antiques Roadshow. The Power of Art is like Behind the Music: Classical Art. Each one is about the rise to heady success, the onset of arrogance, the downfall, and the death in utter disgrace. It's kind of addictive. And I'm mildly in love with Schama, an affable British historian who possesses something of a Tim Gunn air about him. He strolls through galleries in the same open-collar white button-up and black tailored jacket in each episode and tosses out pithy, almost gossipy information about each of the artists and their masterworks. Like Bernini, a sculptor who committed adultery, only to find his brother was doing the same with the same woman, and therefore sent a servant to slash his mistress's face with a razor blade.

I'm no art critic, and, in fact, have very little real understanding of the meaning of most art. But Schama makes these artists into the rock stars of the day, celebrities mingling among the rich and powerful until they decide to make a scandalous statement with their work. It is his exploration of their work that I find so fascinating. The way he talks about it, wandering through the veriest details, it is so captivating that suddenly I can see why David's The Death of Marat is unholy and beautiful and transcendent and treason. And after he raptured about the exquisitely fine line between reverence and revelry in Bernini's The Ecstasy of St. Therese, I hope I get to see it firsthand before I die.

There are only eight episodes, and I'm sorry to say I missed three of them - Van Gogh (featuring Andy Serkis as Van Gogh!), Picasso and Caravaggio. I saw Bernini, Rembrandt and David, and still have Turner and Rothko to go. The show is an absolute culture clash in my mind: art deemed so great that it demanded reverence and an explication of it the brings in all the messy passion and rebellion and irreverence. It is art historian meets Perez Hilton. And I can't get enough.