Olympic Medalists in … Art?

Griff Stecyk | The Sartler | 6th August 2016

With Rio comes a question for the ages: “Can’t arts and sports just get along?” Well, the ever ambitious IOC spent decades up to 1948 trying to show they could. In the Olympic Art Competition medals were given out. “Winning” pieces reveal changing ideas about sport and (even more) the influence of politics. Art in Nazi Berlin, for example, “seemed artistically obsessed with hyper-masculinized, homoerotic imagery”.