Endeavours and masterpieces - Exhibition Catalogue

Exhibition Catalogue "Endeavours and masterpieces", 3 exhibitions presented at the Mucem, the Frac Sud - Cité de l'art contemporain, and the Musée d'art contemporain, Marseille (26 April - 8 September 2024).

There are a thousand ways of approaching the subject of the relationship between art and sport, on the understanding that, although both are capable of producing beauty, sport is not art and art is not sport.

The three entries are as flexible and porous as possible, corresponding to the three exhibition venues.

The Mucem - Musée des Civilisations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée, presents ‘Trophies and Relics’: sport, like art, is rooted in a number of beliefs, most of them very ancient, and its experience is inseparable from a set of artefacts whose effectiveness is largely based on the faith placed in them. Art, then, is at the crossroads between the adoration of relics and the fetishism attached to contemporary objects, whether they belong to stars or to obscure people whom we want to distinguish in this way. Here, art and sport both produce mythology.

At the Frac Sud - Cité de l'art contemporain, under the title ‘L'Heure de gloire’ (The Hour of Glory), in a nod to the Wharolian quarter-hour of celebrity as much as to the all-too-ignored heroism of artists, the cult of performance and the art of losing are presented.

Tableaux d'une exposition’ at [mac], the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Marseille, brings together paintings, drawings and photographs. Beneath the appearance of wise arrangements lies a range of objects, most often undermined, intended not, we insist, to illustrate some occasional theme, but rather, through the medium of sport, to question certain regimes of representation, to identify the very thing that sport is likely to say about art.

The book, which is the fruit of collaboration between the three Marseilles-based institutions, covers virtually the entire content of the exhibitions in three sections, so as to approach the subject from different angles and show all the artistic expressions that have been generated by these links between a certain aspect of reality and contemporary art.

Jean-Marc Huitorel, editor of the book and a leading specialist in the subject, to which he has devoted several exhibitions and books, brings to bear his in-depth knowledge of contemporary art and the artists who are making a difference today. In addition to lively, illuminating commentaries on the works, he has invited other voices to express themselves, in the form of essays on the question of relics, the status of sporting objects and feminist struggles. All generously illustrated and accompanied by meticulous graphic design, the aim is to provide a well-documented overview of a subject that is very much in the international news.