I am not much of a sports fan, so saying that I’m not too into the Olympics is probably not saying much. Still, in a time of grinding austerity and global economic instability, there’s something about London 2012’s stew of bloated excess, shameless corporate celebration, and jingoistic body culture that I find particularly distasteful. As for the cultural component, the six-ring circus that is the Olympic Games tends to instrumentalize all that falls into its orbit, turning art into bombastic nationalist kitsch — which, whatever good you found in it, was precisely what Danny Boyle's freaky Friday night phantasmagoria was.

I do find at least one interesting Olympic side narrative, though, in the way that contemporary art has been increasingly woven into the festivities’ identity. Four years ago, Chinese art star Cai Guo-Qiang, master of arty conceptual fireworks, conceived a ferocious aerial display as part of Zhang Yimou’s Games opener. For London 2012, lovably loopy Scottish neo-conceptualist Martin Creed staged his communal bell-ringing happening (“Work No. 1197: All the Bells in a Country Rung as Quickly and as Loudly as Possible for Three Minutes”) last Friday morning, summoning Britons everywhere to join in a good group clanging. The esoteric realm of art reaches such vertiginous mass-cultural heights only once in a blue moon, and the two aesthetic interventions actually lend themselves to a rather nice compare-and-contrast on the subject of how the cultural ideologies behind these nation-branding spectacles function — or try to function.

Cai’s contribution to the 2008 opening ceremonies — most notably “Footprints of History,” a series of massive fiery footprints in the sky, leading to Beijing's Olympics stadium — was welded seamlessly into the overall bombast of Zhang’s famously awe-inspiring opening ceremony. This integration made good sense in a country where every bit of official culture must be directed in the same direction, ideologically. It was a display of literal aesthetic firepower, perfectly advancing the overall objective of the Beijing opener, which was to reflect, as Ai Weiwei remembered recently, “the party's nationalism,” standing as artistic embodiment of the coordinated might that only the discipline of China’s authoritarian state could marshal. 

Creed’s contribution operated a bit differently. Rather than being folded into Danny Boyle’s opener — which was really more of a frantic highlight reel of UK’s greatest pop culture hits (James Bond! Mr. Bean! Mary Poppins! Paul McCartney!) than a space for fresh creative exploration — the funky national bell-ringing break served as cultural amuse-bouche to the Games. Which is fitting for a country that, with the tabloid-baiting art of the YBAs, pioneered a mode of inserting contemporary art into the public mind by treating it as a kind of sideshow attraction.

Reprising a piece previously staged in Puerto Rico, “All The Bells” mined not art’s recent blockbuster turn but its recent obsession with pseudo-democratic theater. Instead of being a spectacle directed from above, it was an exercise in playfully low-stakes aesthetic participation. The two works are thus perfect symbols of the ideal roles for art in a one-party state versus in a capitalist democracy like the UK, the one serving as imaginary representation of official power, the other serving as idealized representation of popular concord.

There's more, though: What I particularly like about placing Cai’s and Creed’s works side by side is the comparison between the reactions they provoked. Both Olympic artworks provoked a bit of a public backlash, which is perhaps only natural for any cultural work that achieves such a level of popular penetration — but which also ends up saying something about the respective political agendas behind them.