| Believe it or not, but the Olympic Games used to feature art. Specifically, art competitions, held at the modern games from 1912 to 1948. These featured categories like painting, sculpture, graphic art, architectural design and even fields as diverse as Music: Composition for Orchestra, Literature: Epic Works, and even, a little oddly, Merit for Mountaineering.
Held as proper competitions, gold, silver and bronze medals were awarded to the victors. The Merit for Aeronautics category may have only had one winner – Switzerland’s Hermann Schreiber in Berlin, 1936 – but Designs for Town Planning featured medal-winning competitors in every Olympics from Stockholm 1912 to London 1948. The contests represented founder Pierre de Coubertin’s belief in the holistic importance of Olympism – not merely as a sporting ethos, but as a philosophy of life…blending sport with culture and education.
The contests were first taken seriously at the 1924 Paris games, with 193 artists submitting works, while at the 1928 Amsterdam games, 1,100 artworks were exhibited. These numbers rose steadily until 1949, when an IOC report declared artists to be "professionals", and in 1954, the committee decided to replace future contests with exhibitions. The Olympic Charter now mandates the host country’s organisers to include cultural events at each games.
The cancellation of art contests doesn’t rest on the issue of professionalism alone. It raises a bigger question: whether art and sport can co-exist. History tells us that these odd bedfellows have never enjoyed a harmonious relationship; indeed, in many ways, they are mutually exclusive. And perhaps that mutual exclusivity manifests itself best right here on home turf. Australian artists and sections of the Australian public have long lamented the woeful under-appreciation and development of the arts.
Speaking on the ABC’s 7:30 Report on August 12, internationally acclaimed theatre director Barrie Kosky highlighted precisely this critical deficiency in arts appreciation, arguing that art, the soul of a nation, is being starved of funding.
Elitism is okay in a sport. It’s okay to send a handful of the most trained, skilled, perfect Olympic specimens to Canberra and to national sports institutes, he said. But God help us if we did the same in ballet or theatre, or spent the same amount of money on a small group of people in the arts. There’d be an outcry.
Kosky’s criticism was particularly timely in light of Kevin Rudd’s announcement on August 3 that the government would inject more funding into Australia’s elite sporting program, following John Coates’ warning that Australia would plummet in the medal tally without additional financial support.
This kind of patronage, however, is exactly what Kosky opposed. We don’t have patrons – we don’t have the Medicis, we don’t have the Rockefellers and the Carnegies to give millions and millions of dollars. We don’t have these billionaire philanthropists, he said. Politicians are [therefore] incredibly important when it comes to the arts and they have an enormous responsibility.
With the Olympic games over, it’s worth giving thought to the various policy options surrounding arts funding, and to how the arts are promoted more generally in Australia. Competitions like Designs for Town Planning may not have been the most inspired of ideas, but they were certainly demonstrative of the important role the arts play in shaping our sense of national identity and culture.
Lukasz Swiatek
Magazine The Bull
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