As the 2022 winter Olympics kick off in Beijing, the awarding of Olympic medals for things like literature, sculpture, music, painting, and architecture sounds like a bohemian fantasy. But the arts were a big part of the original vision of the founder of the modern Olympic games, Pierre de Coubertin.
All of the works entered into the creartive categories had to be original, not previously shown, published, or publicly performed, and they had to take sports as their subject. The competitions were augustly named the “Pentathlon of the Muses.”
How cultural priorites change, eh?
