"This focus on the old is, well, new. Although every ceremony is, to some degree, a celebration of the host country's history, the event has recently tended to feel like a technology-conference keynote, or a music festival. Two years ago, in Paris, organizers turned the 7th arrondissement into a light show and devoted considerable airtime to the Minions. Beijing's event, in 2022, looked uncannily like a laptop screensaver."
"This year's ceremony, by contrast, opened with a pair of dancers in angel wings reenacting the neoclassical sculpture Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss, which was created about 100 years before the invention of the lightbulb. The show then ran through a psychedelic tribute to a bygone Italy, a sort of live highlight reel of hundreds of years of civilization, rendered bonkersly but quaintly: Color-saturated Roman centurions marched solemnly in line with people dressed as moka pots;"
Every Olympics opening ceremony functions as an advertisement for the host country, the Olympics themselves, and the idea of a free-trading global order competing through sport on even ground. The Milan–Cortina Winter Games shifted focus toward historical and nostalgic imagery rather than recent technological spectacle. Recent ceremonies favored LED-driven, tech-forward displays—Paris turned a neighborhood into a light show and featured the Minions; Beijing resembled a laptop screensaver; Tokyo used minimalist soundtracks and drones. The Milan–Cortina opening staged neoclassical reenactments, psychedelic tributes to Italy, costumed Roman centurions, moka pots, pasta and paparazzi gags, and oversized bobblehead composers, with references spanning decades to millennia.
Read at The Atlantic
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