Deceptive artwork: the olympics fireworks controversy

With another Olympic Games in the books (and what a Games it was!), I’m going to do the logical thing and take us back to the very beginning.  By that I mean, of course, that legendary opening ceremony that bewildered and dazzled us one and all, and deservedly so…or not? It’s perfectly clear that whoever designed, choreographed, and executed this ceremony (and I’m not saying it was all one person) is an artist, plain and simple.  This kind of vision doesn’t come along every day.  It doesn’t even come along every four years.  There’s no question that this ceremony took perfect coordination, and hours upon hours upon days upon months and months of labor and planning to pull off this two hour presentation.  Everything we saw on TV was a real visual treat and then some.

Except, maybe, for the “real” part.

As we all know by now, China went for a doctored effect during the fireworks display, computer generated effects abounded and when people found out, some probably couldn’t help feeling a bit disappointed that what they saw wasn’t “real.” Of course, one has to wonder about the authenticity of a pyrotechnic that stretches from the Forbidden City to the Olympic Stadium…that is one BIG firework.  I’m not saying that this is the only time China has tried to deceive us. Far from it.  We all remember those 12 year old girls doing backflips on the high beam.  But those fireworks are pretty shameless. They didn’t even TRY to cover it up (which I’m not sure is good or bad).

But from an artist’s perspective, it’s different.  It gives the visual artist an opportunity to design whatever he wants to be seen from a TV screen. It might not be seen by the couple hundred thousand actually present, but it sure was seen by over 50 million people watching worldwide.  In this case, the artist, one Mr. Cai Guo-Qiang designed a very creative concept: 29 footprint-shaped “fireworks” made their way from the edge of Beijing to the Stadium, a distance of 9.3 miles (Beijing represents the Games of the 29th Olympiad). So before everyone gets upset at China for being so image-conscious that they are no longer genuine (assuming they ever were), we should keep in mind that this is also the perfect opportunity for a very creative artist to get his work shown to essentially more people than he ever could anywhere else.  So call the Chinese Olympic Committee liars, cheaters and whatever else that’s coming to them but I think they deserve a bit of credit for maximizing the artistic potential of this ceremony. And at the end of the day, the opening (and closing) ceremony is about just that: art. There are no medals awarded; athletic activities are not the focus. So in that sense, China should be praised, not decried for presenting the TV audience with an outrageous fireworks display, real or not. A brilliant artist gets to show the world what he’s capable of. Is it really that important whether it’s “real” or not?

It’s really all in the spirit of the Games.