This book is about art: its visions, its aesthetic power, and its social importance. Not theory. You will become acquainted with artistic concepts from the period around 1972 and the early years of the twenty-first century. Moreover, you are invited to discover projects that have been forgotten and current works of art that point to the future. Interdisciplinary engagement with global reality and the role of art in shaping the future is integral to both.
The starting point for this publication is the prominent role of art and culture in the context of planning for an international sporting event: the 20th Olympic Games in Munich in 1972. The book project was begun on the occasion of the 50th anniversary in 2022; it activates nearly forgotten ideas, questions them, and brings their relevance into play for the current role of art in real and digital public spaces.
The period around 1970 was marked by decolonialization, political conflict, and the Cold War. The Club of Rome predicted that the end of nonrenewable resources was near. There was growing awareness of the consequences both of exploiting nature and of advancing capitalization. The younger generation in Germany was engaged in a distinctly critical debate over the country’s National Socialist past.
Fifty years after the games, our world has changed significantly. The idealistic concept that sports and art can playfully create a new, exemplary, international, cheerful, young coexistence hardly seems believable any longer in view of a war in Europe, social division, increasing radicalization, hate, and rabble-rousing, as well as international turbo capitalism. Immediately after the attack on the Israeli athletes on September 5, 1972, the president of the National Olympic Committee, Willi Daume, summed it up at the closing ceremonies on September 11, 1972: “In several months, in a few years, perhaps even only in a few decades, people will say that Munich was a historical event whose tragedy, confusion, and immaturity revealed the problems with which we have to live in this world today.”1
Fifty years later, these words, as well as the visionary impulses and plans for the games, convey the great topicality of the concepts of the time. Along with art, they were intended to make the world a better place and challenged people to imagine the coming fifty years in terms of current issues. The book at hand focuses on the present state of artistic conception and production; it conveys a sense of the conditions that art needs in order to have an effect within the social context in a lasting way.
This publication is divided into two parts and an intermezzo. It begins with a historical chapter, Part 1, which describes for the first time the significance of art within the 20th Olympic Games. The intermezzo follows with photographs by Jörg Koopmann of the 2022Festival of the Games, Sports, and the Arts in the Olympic Park in Munich. In Part 2, more than forty designers and experts on art and theory look at contemporary artworks in order to develop ideas and thoughts about the role of art in the society of the future.
Visions and Reality: Art for the 1972 Munich Olympics
In the first section, thirteen authors s
