From 1912 to 1948, the Olympics gave out medals in the arts. (Wikipedia says the arts competitions stopped because artists were considered professionals while Olympians had to be amateurs. Really? Nothing to do with the war?)

Now, instead, the Olympics does arts in its "Cultural Olympiad." For Vancouver 2010, the Cultural Olympiad 2009 starts February 1 (a list of visual art events is here). The 2010 Olympiad is already being hatched—partly here in Seattle, by curator Eric Fredericksen (director of Western Bridge).

What he has in mind is a project at and with the Vancouver CAG called "An Invitation to an Infiltration."

It would be sort of a critique of institutional critique—sort of. That makes it sound drab, when really it's all jostly. Here's the idea: So many artists get invited to make site-specific works that respond to the spaces where they're shown—what if a bunch of these "helpful" interventions were crammed into the same space, at the CAG? What if these interventions intervened with each other, if they had to "compete" with each other, a la (those amateur) Olympians? And what if each of the included artists came during the show and made yet another response?

I think it sounds grand, like the kind of thing that's approachable on many levels and rewarding as you move between those levels. For artists Fredericksen has in mind Jordan Wolfson, Lucy Clout, and Dexter Sinister, among others.

The idea might be seen as a reversal of Andrea Fraser's 1994 exhibition "Services," when she brought artists together and asked them to conduct a forum, to "work against the natural antagonism of a group show," Fredericksen said. "I thought what would happen if instead of trying to solve the problem, we amped it up—brought out a naturally competitive aspect of art that might naturally get papered over."

The show would run only for about two weeks and change continually as the artists figure out how to mediate the interventions of their interventions.

CAG and Fredericksen are waiting to hear whether the Olympics will fund the show.

In March, Fredericksen is curating an Olympiad-sponsored show at the Or Gallery in Vancouver, which coincides with another great project: a re-printing of artist Stan Douglas's classic volume "The Vancouver Anthology," which had become so nearly extinct that it was too expensive for artists and students and critics to buy. About 2,000 copies of the second edition will become available here on March 20.