The opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games will not go down in history for its good taste.
It happens when you choose to overdo it.: going over the top always works when it comes to stirring up discussion, but from a country that presents itself to the world for its elegance one would have expected something different.
It all depends on whether what one wishes to accredit as art – and the authors of the Olympic opening ceremonies generally call themselves artists – can be content to limit itself to provocation or whether it also wishes to elevate itself. and be remembered for the poetry, for the universally recognized and recognizable beauty, without the need for captions.
Olympism in its universality aims to speak to everyone, to be a message of unity and sharing, even if it is true that the ceremonies are historically, more or less, markedly nationalistic.: showcases through which the host nation chooses what image of itself it wants to give to the world. Not without some contradiction with the very strict prohibition of article 50 of the Olympic charter according to which: “Every form of demonstration or propaganda, whether political, religious or racial, is prohibited in all Olympic areas”.
But we know that until the Games are formally opened, the ceremonies remain outside that perimeter and send political messages (for better or for worse) in abundance. Right or wrong, that’s how the world has been since Baron Pierre de Coubertin revived the modern Games on ancient vestiges.
Paris 2024 did not shy away from this tradition, on the contrary: it celebrated its own history, not without falling into kitsch. and in the grotesque of Marie Antoinette looking out onto the Conciergerie with her head severed. He has quite legitimately chosen to send a message of inclusion in every sense. But for this the Marseillaise entrusted to the statuesque figure of Axelle Saint-Cirel, a mezzo-soprano born in Guadeloupe, would have been enoughwho sang in the rain on the roof of the Grand Palais holding the flag like a black Marianne, sorority and references to love not only between men and women, through the books of Verlaine and other French poets, in the context of the library.
They might still have attracted some criticism, but they wouldn’t have offended those who think differently. In a democracy it is legitimate to express oneself while taking dissent into account. Instead, it would have been possible, and perhaps should have been avoided, in the name of a misunderstood concept of secularism, of bringing into play, badly in a distorting quotation of dubious taste, a sacred image such as Leonardo’s Last Supper. Da Vinci, knowing that the way could offend the religious sensibilities of many people, because to include means to respect, even the faith of those who have it.
And after all, thinking about it, even poor Leonardo, to whom France owes no small debt in the form of millions of tourists attracted every year to the Louvre by the Mona Lisa, would have deserved to see a work like the Last Supper treated with greater grace and historical sense, a work which, through its fragility, represents, among other things, the delicacy of art throughout the world.
It won’t take much Paris 2024 if last night, having seen more water than class, we felt a hint of nostalgia for the fairytale atmosphere of Lillehammer 1994 and for the boy in the paper boat of Athens 2004: less pretension, but more poetry. But maybe Paris had also taken that into account.