Newsnight Review discussed Aztecs at the Royal Academy.

Aztecs, an exhibition of art and artefacts from ancient Mexico, showing at the Royal Academy.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

Watch the whole programme

MARK LAWSON:
Germaine Greer, generally we feel sympathetic towards the people who were colonised, but they are so vicious. I found myself shivering at the horrors of these people.

GERMAINE GREER:
It makes you think about the relationship between beauty and cruelty. Beauty is a measure of control. We saw icon after icon of control, but they paid heavily for that control.

Many of the forms were compressed into simple shapes so that the plumed serpent turns out to be an egg shape whereas I always saw him as flying. There is nothing volatile about this culture, everything is about containment. It's based on fear. You embed the environment with wills towards evil, for example, you had the notion that if someone isn't sacrificed the world will end.

MARK LAWSON:
A pot for flayed skin!

GERMAINE GREER:
The pot for flayed skin is one of the most beautiful objects I have ever seen. These are people with a highly developed technology. Let that be a warning to us that technology won't save you. It doesn't prevent them from having crass ideas about religion.

The notion that since the gods have sacrificed themselves for you, therefore you must feed the gods struck me as having an uncomfortable continuity with Catholicism. It's embedded in magic.

EKOW ESHUN:
The interesting things weren't the high priest examples of art, as you see throughout the exhibition, but the small moments, the people moments. My favourite piece is a statue of a young man who's been drinking too much and as a consequence his eyes are red.

I wanted to see more real life - to see how the people lived. We didn't see so much of that. Maybe that is a consequence of what survives over hundreds of years.

This is a dark culture. For instance, the statue the Goddess of Fertility is also the Goddess of Filth.

MICHAEL GOVE:
There is a Hannibal Lecter element to it. The Aztecs did not just confront death - they revelled in it. A theocratic society saturated in blood that tied captives to sacrificial pieces of stone armed with feathers and had fully equipped warriors take them to pieces. It's a disgusting culture. I almost felt I was glad that the Aztec culture had been stopped by the Spanish.

MARK LAWSON:
Liberals are going to be upset. They would say we are judging them about our standards.