The Olympic opening ceremonies featured a scene straight from Sodom and Gomorrah. Which risks provoking a contrapuntal chorus of “Where?” and “What’s wrong with that?”, capturing the complex, desperate, banal, deceitful naivete at the heart of this June 26 monstrosity including the tepid pseudo-apology when it created the outrage it clearly aimed for.
Let’s start with the obvious. It was a transparent, obnoxious, depraved parody of the Last Supper and particularly Da Vinci’s famous painting. Which at least these organizers and “artists” had heard of, though they later denied everything. How could they not?
The Last Supper is among the most parodied works ever, possibly behind Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein’s Monster and Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. That “Leonardo” should have created two of the three (and be instantly recognizable by first name alone) is a measure of his transcendent genius especially since (I Googled, having had no idea) “Despite having many lost works and fewer than 25 attributed major works – including numerous unfinished works – he created some of the most influential paintings in the Western canon.”
Unlike the poseurs currently throwing sexualized trash in our faces. As G.K. Chesterton warned, “all feeble spirits naturally live in the future, because it is featureless; it is a soft job; you can make it what you like…. It requires real courage to face the past, because the past is full of facts which cannot be got over; of men certainly wiser than we and of things done which we could not do. I know I cannot write a poem as good as Lycidas. But it is always easy to say that the particular sort of poetry I can write will be the poetry of the future.” Or the degrading, uninteresting dance routines.
At least in his day Nijinsky was original. And daring, because he might face real consequences. Whoever he was.
I won’t belabour the blasphemy because others have nailed it, including my National Post colleague Fr. Raymond J. de Souza. Or the cowardice, though clearly these “transgressive” artists would never dare parody Mohamed.
Still, speaking of cowardice, I do want to highlight the apology. Or rather apology-like object, because there wasn’t a hint of genuine contrition in the thing.
It took two days for “Paris 2024 spokesperson Anne Descamps” to come up with this babble: “Clearly, there was never an intention to show disrespect to any religious group.” Right. Turn Christ and the apostles into depraved writhing sensualists with no disrespect intended. Instead the ceremony “tried to celebrate community tolerance”. By being grossly intolerant toward a group everyone you know treats with contemptuous hostility.
She added “We believe this ambition was achieved,” which surely left some including her wondering why she was obliged to address a wave of global outrage. But then (drum roll please) came the classic sorry-you’re-an-idiot line: “If people have taken any offense, we are really sorry.”
Untrue. As de Souza wrote, the organizers would not have tolerated any show of disrespect toward corporate sponsors. “Everything in the opening ceremonies is carefully reviewed and approved. With the global variety of cultures and creeds present, care is taken not to degrade or disgrace…. It was not an accident, but a deliberate provocation, approved at the highest levels. It reveals that at those levels of French society, and the IOC, anti-Christian sacrilege is acceptable.”
Duh. And it makes this wretched spectacle so unsuccessful even as art. You can’t rebel by hewing to socially acceptable standards, even if there were a bourgeoisie left to shock whose own conduct would not make an artist blanch. But really, grinding drag queens sexualizing Christian images in front of kids… again?
De Souza also notes that after introducing South Korean as North Korea, speaking of modern ignorance, the organizers said, “It was clearly deeply regrettable and we apologize wholeheartedly.” Which is a real apology, whereas Christians could go jump in the Seine. They weren’t sorry about the blasphemy, they were proud of it.
Unjustly, on every ground from banality to cowardice to immorality. But here’s where things get really weird. The organizers, and “artists”, had no idea their brand of “controversy” could actually be controversial and fled when confronted.
France24 reported po-faced that “Opening ceremony choreographer” Thomas “Jolly also denied taking inspiration from the Last Supper”. Bosh. It was blindingly obvious. Even to the Olympic committee which, the New York Post pointed out, originally spun a very different excuse: “‘Thomas Jolly took inspiration from Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting to create the setting,’ an Olympics spokesperson admitted to The Post in a statement on Saturday… ‘He is not the first artist to make a reference to what is a world-famous work of art. From Andy Warhol to “The Simpsons,” many have done it before him,’ the statement continued.”
Indeed. Including Monty Python, in one of their more enduringly worthwhile sketches, “Why Michaelangelo Didn’t Paint the Last Supper”. But in it the Pope, a classic slightly stuffily exasperated John Cleese, clearly has the better of the argument against an artist who includes Jello, a kangaroo, 28 disciples and three Christs on grounds of artistic licence. It is cheeky, creative, funny, and respectful. The Olympic ceremony was none of the above. Including daring.
Facing real consequences, the organizer fled in disarray. “’The idea was to do a big pagan party linked to the gods of Olympus,’ Jolly told the BFM channel on Sunday.” And for bad measure: “You’ll never find in my work any desire to mock or denigrate anyone. I wanted a ceremony that brings people together, that reconciles, but also a ceremony that affirms our Republican values of liberty, equality and fraternity”.
A big “but”, given how that coercively monotonous egalité/fraternité business makes short work of liberté and the “diversity” he claimed to be celebrating. As with the new Olympic Motto that added to “Citius, Altius, Fortius” the stifling collectivist “Communiter”. And of course Jolly also intended “to include everyone.” Except Christians. But who knows any of them, or wants to?
Today swallowed the Dionysian claim and mood whole, writing “When asked about the backlash July 27, the ceremony’s artistic director, Thomas Jolly, said at a press conference that he did not intend ‘to be subversive,’ ‘mock’ or ‘shock.’” Rubbish. What else does modern art ever attempt, from Warhol’s soup cans to that banana duct-taped to the wall to works mixing Christian iconography with excrement? Same old same old.
So what’s going on? Here it’s important that modern art now swims in a fish bowl less sanitary even than the Seine, in which everyone has exactly the same rebellious thoughts, uses exactly the same bold tropes, and has no idea anyone who does not share their lifestyle exists, or should. And as with the people in Sodom and Gomorrah, if you’d tried to tell them there were other, better ways to live, they’d have laughed you to scorn, and perhaps sacrificed you to some bloodthirsty demon or another for good measure.
Indeed, these Olympics also feature the depraved spectacle of men pummelling women in a well-lit public place in front of a paying audience. If it had happened under Nero, we’d say “Who?” or, if we actually knew history, “Typical”. But nowadays we lack much basis for comparison. Unlike, say, the audience for Louis Jordan’s song “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman” who were clearly expected to know their history from Rome to the French Revolution though, ironically, much that is in that song genuinely would shock our avant-garde. Speaking of which, the ceremony also featured a decapitated Marie Antoinette, a curious way to include women, or anyone not entirely in sympathy with the French Revolution and its bloody excesses.
At the same time it reminded me of Sodom and Gomorrah in being so debauched and savage yet trite and mournful. It wasn’t people having fun. It was people pretending to have fun in a way that cannot possibly bring happiness and fulfilment, but utterly amazed that anyone might feel differently.
There’s a scene in C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra, where the hero, Elwin Ransom, finds himself face to face with a devil and discovers the dreadful naivete of evil.
“It looked at Ransom in silence and at last began to smile. We have all often spoken – Ransom himself had often spoken – of a devilish smile. Now he realized that he had never taken the words seriously. The smile was not bitter, nor raging, nor, in an ordinary sense, sinister; It was not even mocking. It seemed to summon Ransom, with a horrible naïveté of welcome, into the world of its own pleasures, as if all men were at one in those pleasures, as if they were the most natural thing in the world and no dispute could ever have occurred about them. It was not furtive, nor ashamed, it had nothing of the conspirator in it. It did not defy goodness, it ignored it to the point of annihilation.”
A pillar of salt is not art. It’s annihilation. Don’t be a pillar of salt.
