1 of 23

PENTATHLON of the MUSES

Mapping the Olympic Art Competitions

2 of 23

The Olympic Art Competitions

1912

1948

That may be hard to believe, but the Art Competitions did last for almost forty years, evolving alongside the early Olympics: from the point when the Games were little more than World’s Fairs, through the globalization of the competitions, into the Nazi Games of 1936, and out of World War II with the emergence of new participating states.

The rules were pretty simple, even if they varied somewhat from year to year: art-works should relate to sport or the Olympics in some way; a panel of international judges would evaluate them; and submissions would be exhibited in local museums or galleries during the Games.

There most common question I get, at this point, is ‘why did the contests stop?’ And I think it’s worth pausing on that question, because in a way, it motivates our project.

3 of 23

Medal Winners

2 main reasons the contests were cancelled: amateurism rules, and supposed lack of world-class submissions
You can see where the IOC was coming from on this… In many cases, a jury wouldn’t even deign to award a single medal for a given category because of the weakness or the small number of submissions. The artworks that did win medals look like this (slide). When you imagine these artworks getting picked and getting celebrated in the same decades that produced Picasso… These look a little drab. They’re sentimentally classical, or technically proficient but uninspired, or a bit kitschy.
And to the extent that anyone knows about the Olympic Art Competitions, this is what they see. The medal-winners, after all, are the works mentioned on Wikipedia, and in articles in the Atlantic or on art blogs.

4 of 23

Medal Losers

Robert Graves

Walter Gropius

Antonia Matos

5 of 23

The Full Competitions

3,000+ submissions by 2,000+ artists from 50 countries
Artworks in five different art-forms and a dozen sub-categories
Seven Olympiads, spanning two world wars
For most of the submissions, images (or text) have been lost

(Go over bullet points)

How can we grasp all of this--this volume of submissions over such a long and complicated span?

The answer, it seems, is digital: to look at the art competitions distantly (at least at first) to understand its trends. We don’t want to get rid of the appeal of individual artworks, but we also don’t have to look at them in isolation: we can understand them as representative of moments of political or Olympic history, and we can see how they take part in a world-wide circulation of art-works.

The upshot, here, is that we can learn about more than just the Olympic Art Competitions: this is, after all, at a basic level, data about the global movement of thousands of artworks during the decades of modernism--a period when artistic styles and cultural capitals were multiplying all over the world. The Olympics just happen to give us a way to visualize the modernist period by giving us particular cross-slices, in different cities and different years.

As I’ve been hinting, there’s a historical story here as well as a geographical one. So with our website, we introduce users to the Olympic Art Competitions in time, and then we let them play around with the data in space.

6 of 23

The Full Competitions

3,000+ submissions by 2,000+ artists from 50 countries
Artworks in five different art-forms and a dozen sub-categories
Seven Olympiads, spanning two world wars
For most of the submissions, images (or text) have been lost

How can we grasp all of this--this volume of submissions over such a long and complicated span?

The answer, it seems, is digital: to look at the art competitions distantly (at least at first) to understand its trends. We don’t want to get rid of the appeal of individual artworks, but we also don’t have to look at them in isolation: we can understand them as representative of moments of political or Olympic history, and we can see how they take part in a world-wide circulation of art-works.

The upshot, here, is that we can learn about more than just the Olympic Art Competitions: this is, after all, at a basic level, data about the global movement of thousands of artworks during the decades of modernism--a period when artistic styles and cultural capitals were multiplying all over the world. The Olympics just happen to give us a way to visualize the modernist period by giving us particular cross-slices, in different cities and different years.

As I’ve been hinting, there’s a historical story here as well as a geographical one. So with our website, we introduce users to the Olympic Art Competitions in time, and then we let them play around with the data in space.

7 of 23

Audience

Scholars of twentieth-century history, art, or sports

A general public interested in seeing a new side of the Olympics or of modern art

8 of 23

Design Concept

Flow Chart of the Journey

9 of 23

Current Application

Layout and Methods

10 of 23

Current Application

Layout and Methods

11 of 23

Current Application

Layout and Methods

12 of 23

Metadata

sports-reference.com

exhibition catalogue

13 of 23

Metadata

“OlympicResults” spreadsheet

14 of 23

Database

Software Programs:

PHP Admin Example:

15 of 23

Timeline: Under the Hood

Software Programs:

HTML
CSS / Bootstrap
JavaScript
JQuery

16 of 23

Timeline

Title and Page information

Scroll through text summary

Go back to the home page

Click on the dates to see the different events

Map and Image to show user

17 of 23

ArtMap: Under the Hood

Web Interface

Server Code Sample

18 of 23

ArtMap Data Flow

Web Interface

JSON over HTTP

Node.js Server

SQL Interface

Olympic Database

(MySQL)

19 of 23

Demonstration

http://104.197.121.200/

20 of 23

Visualization Prospect

Color and Icon

21 of 23

Interactive Prospect

Pop up and Page connection

Artist

22 of 23

1948 and Beyond

23 of 23

From Olympic Competitions to the Cultural Olympiad

est. 2 billion viewers

BEIJING 2008: Opening Ceremonies

When the Art Competitions ended after 1948, the arts took a new role in the Olympics in the form of the “Cultural Olympiad”: performances of local arts and culture put together by the host city. Last summer, for example, there were spontaneous, pop-up performances around Rio de Janeiro. But the most famous example of the continued role of the arts in the Games in recent memory comes from Beijing 2008, and their Opening Ceremonies in particular.

The 2008 Beijing Olympics remain the most widely watched event in world history, gathering some 4.7 billion viewers. Of those, over two billion—nearly one third of the world population at the time—tuned in for the Opening Ceremonies. At Games that featured record-breaking athletic performances by Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps, the most memorable performance of all, then, may have come before any of the sports. The Opening Ceremony, for all of its feats of acrobatic athletics, was primarily a celebration of culture and the arts, combining scroll painting, Confucius’s Analects, zither music, moveable type, and opera. The Olympics, then, are responsible for the most viewed live art performance ever. And underlying that success is the Art Competitions. We hope our site makes a new generation of artists, critics, and Olympic fans aware of the sheer scale of the old Art Competitions, just as we’re made aware of the scale of continuing Olympic arts every 4 years.