Nik Berlin 👊🏻🧐

I prefer not to signal-boost deliberate ugliness, but I also prefer not to have deliberate ugliness at the Olympics, so I'll make an exception: not to be melodramatic, but I hated this performance and think it brought shame on the entire country of France. I've always had a soft spot for the Olympics, for this grand ceremony of bringing nations and peoples together, even as mirage—to celebrate excellence and beauty and healthy competition. It's all symbolic, yes, it solves nothing fundamental—but symbolism matters. There is a time and a place for shock art. The Olympics is not it. If you single one culture out for mockery, you remind everyone of the dog that does not bark, of the cultures your edgiest and most avant-garde artists do not dare to mock. If you lean into mockery in the only way mockery can truly work as a unifier, equal-opportunity poking at all and sundry, you remind the whole world of how fragile the mirage is. Would the event be better with a skewering of Muhammad, of the CCP or North Korea, of a thousand small-scale sensitivities and tensions around the world? No. It would destroy the spirit of the Olympics, turn an earnest and unifying moment into the catalyst for hideous feuds. The ceremony was not edgy, it faked edginess: picking on acceptable targets and daring them to object so they could be slapped down. Symbolism matters, and the symbolism France chose was, to quote @puheenix, "indistinguishable from the hunger games capital citizens." Garish, loud, and ugly. Excess for the sake of excess, shock (but carefully constrained shock! scandalize-your-grandparents shock, not scandalize-your-friends shock) for the sake of shock, ugliness for the sake of ugliness. Not the time, not the place. There is no virtue in this.