The 2012 whitewash?

The 2012 Cultural Olympiad emerged amid widespread contention in Spring 2007. Contrary to 2005 promises that not a penny would come from the public purse to help fund the Olympics and that only £1.5m would be raised from the National Lottery, it became clear that national arts funding would bear the brunt of cuts.
Through our work as criticalnetwork, an arts communication network covering cultural activity and opportunities in the UK and Ireland, we have witnessed the early stages of an insidious shift in contemporary art practices, gallery programmes, public projects and commissions as existing funding dries up and pressure mounts to comply with the new funding agendas of the Cultural Olympiad, the core themes of which range from the nauseating “celebrating London and the whole of the UK welcoming the world” and “generating a positive legacy”, to the slightly more sinister “honour the values of the Olympic Games”. Funding bodies have always specified engagement with certain publics, locations or media, but the shift towards dictating the content and ideology of projects on such a widespread level has worrying implications for UK arts activity. No funding criteria should stipulate conformity to particular values or propagate emotions such as celebration: this is cultural tyranny.

With friends like these…
It may be naive to believe that artists can still exercise the autonomy needed to voice counter-opinions and present alternatives, but it is hard to imagine that projects that align themselves with the flag-waving corporatism of the Olympics will carry much artistic merit. As artist Grayson Perry rightly asks, “What if you wanted to create something really filthy about McDonald’s, say, an Olympic sponsor? Would you get to make it? Or is the desire really for clubbable, Anthony Gormley-like public artworks that won’t scare the horses?” In addition to McDonald’s (which produces over a million tonnes of packaging annually), the Olympics counts among its corporate partners: BP (the largest retail fuel chain in Britain), EDF Energy (currently pursuing the construction of four new nuclear power plants in Britain costing up to £3.6bn), and Cadbury (which uses palm oil in its products, the cultivation of which is at the centre of the large-scale destruction of South-east Asian rainforests). Interesting, then, that the Cultural Olympiad cites “raising issues of environmental sustainability, health and well-being” as one of its themes.
Another highly questionable element of the Cultural Olympiad rhetoric is the emphasis on mass participation: “the Cultural Olympiad is for everyone”, we are assured. Those who don’t make it into the main strand of events are invited to apply for the ‘Inspire mark’, provided it meets all three “core values” of the Cultural Olympiad and at least three of its seven themes. On closer inspection, however, this scheme appears to function primarily as free advertising for the Cultural Olympiad, with recipients receiving no funding, yet consenting to promote the scheme across all associated marketing material. More worryingly, the Inspire mark recipient also becomes contracted to submit all related artwork for approval, facilitating a system of recuperation and control that stretches far beyond the major Olympiad projects.

Voluntary exploitation
The exploitation of free labour extends across the whole of the Games, with 70,000 volunteers currently sought to fulfil roles from event stewards to trained medics. In sickening contrast to this are the eye-watering wages received by members of the eighteen-strong London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (LOCOG) Board, which includes several multimillionaires and HRH Princess Anne, who enjoys a £500 hourly wage for her attendance at planning meetings. The salaries of LOCOG Chair Lord Coe and Chief Executive Paul Deighton were recently revealed as £357,000 and £638,000 respectively, with former Goldman Sachs banker Deighton, who holds an estimated personal fortune of over £100m, set to receive around £1m in bonuses, if the Games are deemed to have been a success. A veritable army of strategists, advisors and facilitators are reaping the rewards of the billions of pounds of public and private investment into 2012, employed by personnel-heavy quangos criticised for unnecessary and wasteful expenditure, excessive bonuses and perks. The Olympic Board, the Olympic Delivery Authority, the Olympic Park Regeneration Steering Group, the British Olympic Association, the British Olympic Foundation, the Olympic Lottery Distributor, the London Cultural Consortium, nine Regional Development Agencies and 13 Nations and Regions groups make up just a fraction of this impenetrable bureaucratic sector.
The first major Cultural Olympiad project, ‘Artists Taking the Lead’ consists of 12 new commissions spearheaded by ACE and amounting to £5.4m. Awarding such epic fees for so few commissions seems inherently at odds with mass participation, and indicates a trend towards the marketability of art as spectacle over the sustainability of grassroots projects. Each of the new commissions “will become a creative celebration of the London 2012 Games… and will take part in a final unifying celebration”. ‘Artists on a Lead’ would surely be a more suitable title for this prescriptive manifesto, which subjugates the artist to the role of the commissioner’s faithful lapdog, and demands art that functions as a marketing
ploy to a centralised exercise in patriotism and Olympic rebranding.
Criticalnetwork recently announced that it would not promote events that formed part of the Cultural Olympiad programme. This position was not intended to reprimand artists, but to bring the Olympiad back into an arena for critical debate, something that is conspicuously lacking at the moment. As yet, however, this seemingly radical position is of little real significance in terms of affecting the outcomes of our collective decision making, as we are yet to receive information on a Cultural Olympiad project fit for publication in any self-respecting arts listing.