of art's stories and Olympic circuses.

At the heart of the money pouring into the Olympics  is nationalistic narcissisma and the political need  to keep the people from being  questioning citizens by creating consumers. Consumers  of products and consumers of patriotic messages of  national pride  Fascism, in fact ! Remember Leni Riefenstahl's 'Olympia'  and the Nazi stress on bodies.  Aryan bodies." Fascinating Facism" as Susan Sontag called it.

when the Olympics strike, you realise how fragile the public validation of that art really is. As buff specimens of bodily splendour strut across our screens like visiting gods from a perfect planet, the country opens its mouth to gaze … at what? At what? At somebody winning something that if they hadn't, somebody else would have won.

Through art, societies emerge, develop, engage, change. Art tells lots of stories not, a la sport, the same one over and over again.

In Periclean Athens cultural patronage produced an unprecedented array of plays, poems, paintings and sculpture. These things are a major measure of civilisation, not just because they're nice to look at, but because they mean something.

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/oh-for-a-cultural-revolution-20120809-23wzz.html 



The  most iconic  photograph  of Australia is Max Dupain's 1937  'sunbaker",an echo of Nazi images from the same period. 

 http://www.olicito.de/blog/images/stories/Jan/max-dupain-oliver-weber-blog.jpg

One sees it everywhere and it delivers a message about coast hugging white Australians that can't be missed.  But there is another message behind that image -one that links to  his father. George Dupain was a champion of Eugenics. He believed in selective breeding for a stronger white population and he thought that Australia's isolation made it the perfect laboratory for 'positively modifying'  the white Anglo Saxon race .Even in the late 1960s eminent Australians believed that  the land could still be the last refuge of the pure white Aryan.

The  fascist cult of the body and its attendant  consumerism does't just live on. It is alive - with all guns blazing. 

                                              "black and white" - second ed 1996