The mesmerising Olympic posters designed by the likes of Warhol and Whiteread

You could be forgiven for assuming that the citizens of Paris weren’t exactly bursting with joy at the prospect of this summer’s Olympic Games. They’re annoyed at everything: road closures, public transport price hikes and – would you believe it? – the prospect of their country being taken over by extremist cranks before the month is out.  Bref, or indifference towards the Games is the prevailing attitude – and should you need (flimsy, anecdotal) evidence, I offer you the fact that when I visited an exhibition devoted to the Olympics the day before the first round of voting in the election last week, I had the space entirely to myself.

It was a shame. Olympisme: une histoire du monde at the Palais de la Porte Dorée, an exemplary art deco exhibition hall formerly known as Le Palais des Colonies, is a show that deserves a crowd. Charting the history of the Games, iteration by iteration, and broken up into neat chronological chunks, it is a multimedia spectacular incorporating wall-filling film projections (of Jesse Owens’s triumphant, raised middle-finger of a victory in Berlin in 1936; and rather less necessarily, of Midnight Oil’s gig at the closing of Sydney 2000), team kits, memorabilia (a very Jeff Koons-esque silver Coke bottle from Atlanta 1996), posters, photos and archival material. From the moment you enter, it’s clear that this is no exercise in hagiography. Big, sceptical phrases leap from the ably translated wall texts: ‘ethical dilemmas’; ‘hyped-up media coverage’; ‘public distrust’. The green agenda of the Olympics is lambasted as ‘incompatible’ with the nature of the event, the political dimension magnified. We learn that the first Olympics, in 1896, was a minor affair, but a textbook deployment of soft power on the part of George I of Greece; that Montreal, attempting something similar in 1976, botched it heroically, lavishing CA$1.65