When the Olympics Gave Medals to Artists

So when you watch the Tokyo Games in 2020, remember that this seeming competition between nations actually represents an astonishing global agreement. For all the national pride people feel when their delegation wins a gold medal and their flag is raised, there is far greater reason to feel pride that humankind is capable of organising such an even

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Getting a gallery is not a goal with a repeatable path. Making it in the upper echelons of the art world is as idiosyncratic a process as making it in Hollywood. But if an artist uses the periscope move, she might find other artists—ones she admires—who are in her same shoes. And if those same artists were to organize an exhibition together with a

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Once, the artist was central to how societies made meaning — a steward of vision, beauty, and change. But today, in the corridors of commerce and policy, the artist is too often dismissed. Aesthetic garnish. A nice-to-have. Miscast as a fringe visionary, an outsider to the “real” work of business and strategy.

But this caricature doesn’t hold.

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STEPPING INTO THE ARENA In ancient Greece, learning in public was woven into everyday life. To acquire new knowledge, you ventured into the bustling agora, the public square. There, elders shared their wisdom with small crowds, and you could join animated debates between scholars. To propose a new philosophical theory, you presented it openly in th

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Two decades later, in 1995, the American psychologist Thomas Gilovich, who collaborated in turn with Danny and Amos, coauthored a study that examined the relative happiness of silver and bronze medal winners at the 1992 Summer Olympics. From video footage, subjects judged the bronze medal winners to be happier than the silver medal winners. The sil

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