Introducing Rakewell, Apollo’s wandering eye on the art world. Look out for regular posts taking a rakish perspective on art and museum stories.
With little more than a week to go before the opening ceremony of the Rio Olympics, excitement is running high – not least on the part of media watchers predicting the games will turn out to be a disaster.
Fortunately, the doom-mongering hasn’t affected the traditional artistic celebrations of sporting prowess. In the city’s port area, graffiti artist Eduardo Kobra is attempting to create the largest mural ever painted by one man, while in Australia, primary school children have been invited to send in Olympics-themed daubs to decorate the Aussie section of the Athletes’ Village
Here in London, where rosy memories of the 2012 games still linger, a giant fibreglass sculpture of swimmer Rebecca Adlington has been unveiled in Hyde Park’s Serpentine as part of cereal brand (and Team GB sponsor) Kelloggs’s Great Starts campaign. (As Tony the Tiger might have put it, as public sculpture it ain’t exactly Grrrr-rreat.)
As for the Olympic logo itself, it seems to have gone down rather better than in years past. Readers may remember the furore surrounding the ‘puerile’ branding for London 2012, which sparked diatribes from design commentators. Memorably, writer and critic Stephen Bayley was so outraged by the supposedly condescending design values that he was moved to burn a heap of Olympic merchandise on camera for Vice.
Indeed, the branding for Rio 2016 seems to have been a hit with any number of unlikely demographics. Last week, police in the city’s Lapa district seized more than 90 packets of cocaine from drug dealers – many of which were embellished with the livery of the games. Seems somebody got rather carried away with the Olympian ideals of, erm, high achievement.
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