Often, their agenda has to do both with moral conviction and with protecting or promoting their own status. It is no surprise to find, in a program about gate shaking, that the artists and, even more so, provocative art itself are Culture Shock 's heroes. The stories are filled with ambiguities, but the series's own moral view is relatively unambiguous. There is, sadly, hardly a jolt to be found in Culture Shock , nothing that might make you want to whip out your own smuggled tube of white paint. The series is standard-issue documentary, and its tone is, well, gatekeeperish.
Expert analyses form the backbone.
Enlightenment is lovely, but only rarely do you feel the art and its provocations. There are telling moments in the series, too few and far between, that are a bit tricky to assimilate, especially in the opening program, on Huck Finn , when feeling cracks through the teacherly format. At the center of that program are Raquel Panton, an African-American high school student in Tempe, and her mother Kathy Monteiro. These are no censoring, moralizing ignoramuses, but articulate and angry women, and the film makers make the wise choice not to back away. She did not want to leave, so police were called, and they led her away in handcuffs.