I am proud to announce the publication of the #Paris2024 #CulturalOlympiad evaluation.
You can find it in English here or in French here
It has been an epic task to complete this work, assessing 2,596 officially labelled cultural projects, and publishing key findings just a month after the end of the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
This document should be understood as a macro account of what the French and Parisian Cultural Olympiad was about; what it delivered across France and the French territories; what it intended to do, and the many ways it changed and made an impact on the thousands of organisations involved throughout more than 5,000 cities.
All projects securing the official Cultural Olympiad label shared the vision to ‘link art and sport’ and the majority did so in new, unprecedented ways for France.
As I have argued since my first publications on the subject in 1999, the Cultural Olympiad is a fuzzy entity: it has no defined edges, it involves many stakeholders and presents itself under many names. Despite being little known and very poorly documented, it has evolved since 1912 (when it took the form of Olympic Art Competitions) and it is a defining aspect of the Games experience for the hundreds of thousands of people that may develop an interest in the Olympics and Paralympics but have no access to the sporting competitions.
This is only the second time that a Games Organising Committee commissions a dedicated evaluation for their Cultural Olympiad (I was also in charge of the first one, for London 2012). It is also only the third time that the official Olympic cultural programme is as thoroughly documented, if we include Mexico 1968.
The report highlights the determinant role artists and cultural organisations play as respondents to and interpreters of the Olympic and Paralympic Games experience. It outlines the many layers of a Cultural Olympiad and captures the immediate impact of such an ambitious programme on the arts, culture and sports scene across France. This report also makes it possible to set the roadmap and project the medium to long term cultural and symbolic legacies of the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
#olympiadeCulturelle #culturalOlympiadEvaluation #olympicCulturalProgramme #OlympicArt
