France chases the Olympic dream

Plus: Rave culture gets the museum treatment

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Tom Fleming on how France, like the Olympics, has made progress

The Palais de la Porte Dorée has been home to a museum of immigration since 2007 (though arguably the main draw is the tropical aquarium, installed in 1931). It is currently hosting 'Olympisme: Une histoire du monde', a sweeping exhibition that takes visitors through the history of the modern Olympic Games one edition at a time, from Athens in 1896 to this year's event in Paris. It's one of many shows taking place across the city as part of the cultural programme required of every host city by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The Olympics have always been bound up with national self-expression; in their early years, they were adjuncts to three World's Fairs, beginning with Paris in 1900. In keeping with the Palais's role as a home for diverse histories, the curators of 'Olympisme' ask us to 'read this story in the present tense'.

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Let London be run from County Hall again, writes Edwin Heathcote

The Palace of Westminster and County Hall are both glorified office blocks, but only County Hall acknowledges that fact. The buildings work well as a pair: the self-conscious kitsch of Parliament facing off against the administrative no-nonsense style of the old London County Council (later the GLC). There is a sense in which the current state of County Hall perfectly represents the worst excesses of privatisation: a huge piece of public infrastructure repurposed as an incoherent mass of hotel, aquarium, the London Dungeon and 'Shrek's Adventure!'

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Sam Davies relives raving, but this time it's virtual

Every rave needs a rave casualty. Standing in the darkened space of Birmingham Museum as I'm being strapped into my haptic vest, fitted with a VR headset and headphones, and handed two joystick-like controllers, I suddenly worry that it's me. As someone who occasionally gets motion-sick just watching a 14-year-old roam through Fortnite, what if the full 3D immersion of Darren Emerson's In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats – a 40-minute virtual reconstruction of a late '80s rave – gets too much and I have to lie down in a corner with a bottle of water waiting for my inner ear to chill out? Even more stressful, am I going to have to dance like no one's watching – apart from the gallery staff?

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Rosamund Bartlett on avant-garde art after the Russian Revolution

One hallmark of early 20th-century European modernism was the number of artist couples engaged in creative partnerships: Kandinsky and Münter in Munich, the Delaunays in Paris, Goncharova and Larionov in Moscow. Another equally distinctive feature were the rivalries among the radical leaders of the avant-garde, whose quest to forge a new artistic language was often fuelled by an intense spirit of competition. Picasso and Matisse naturally spring to mind, but the famous friction of their relationship pales in comparison with that of Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin. Their long-running feud forms the backbone of a marvellous new book.

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Michael Delgado on the light relief of Anthony McCall

Anthony McCall made his first light sculpture, Line Describing a Cone, in 1973, but it wasn't until four years later that he fully understood it. The work consists of a projector in a dark room beaming a point of light on to a wall a few metres away. The light inches its way around the wall in a circular motion, like a hand on a clock face, so that, after half an hour, it has traced a full circle. The most interesting aspect of the work, however, is not so much the place where the light hits the wall but the journey of the beam through space. Seen from the side, the shaft of light is, as the title suggests, a solid cone – somehow, impossibly, a three-dimensional object.

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In the current issue…

Eve M. Kahn on the silversmith who struck gold at Tiffany

We know what the collector and tastemaker Edward Chandler Moore (1827–91) liked to look at, handle, read and make, but much else about him remains mysterious. He worked for decades as a silversmith, designer and executive at Tiffany & Co. in New York, while encouraging his underlings to educate themselves by poring through his antiques and library. His treasures ranged from shards of ancient Roman glass to the tiles of Middle Eastern mosques, gourd-shaped Japanese rattan baskets and books about lace and baptismal fonts. His heirs entrusted the collection – about 2,000 objects and 500 volumes – to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has deaccessioned virtually nothing that belonged to Moore. 'Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany & Co.' explores how the company's silverware, with whimsical motifs and experimental combinations of metals, developed from his voracious collecting habits and from the cauldron of upwardly mobile arts patrons and artisans in Gilded Age New York.

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France chases the Olympic dream

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