This week Joe raised the topic of Christian outrage over the Olympics. One of the joys about not really being on social media means that this storm completely passed me by. It was only a couple of days later when I saw a news article about the organisers apologising for it that I realised anyone had got angry.
The idea of people being outraged because of a lampoon of an historically inaccurate painting of the last supper seems odd to me. (And it seems that they were referencing an entirely different picture anyway.) I was reminded of the story about Veronese, who was interrogated by the Inquisition over why he had put beggars, waiters, German guards and all manner of low-status and apparently heretical figures into a painting of the last supper. (He said he put them in because there was space to include them and because he thought the owner of the house ‘would have hired security’.)1
As I said in the show, the scene annoyed me – as did other scenes in the opening ceremony – not because they were offensive to my beliefs, but because they were just bad art. And if you think that the Olympic Opening ceremony shouldn’t be considered as art, then maybe they were bad storytelling. It was predictable and clichéd. All Olympic opening ceremonies veer towards propaganda. Some embrace it more fully than others. But I think, when the world is watching, you don’t have to be so obvious about it. The opening ceremony for London 2012 included some propaganda as well. But it also included Mr Bean playing Chariots of Fire and the Queen parachuting out of a helicopter. That, my friends, is art.
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In the end he escaped punishment by changing the name of the painting to The Feast in the House of Levi. ↩︎