OLYMPICS & THE ARTS

This week, in a preview of the pagentry of the Olympics if not its news value, a press conference to announce an Olympics art exhibition was held in the Supreme Ancestral Temple of the Forbidden City. It went on for more than two hours, featured lots of food and drink, flowers for the VIPS and made-up boys and girls in a children's singing performance.

Chinese and international artists are invited to submit works of art, which will be judged and then displayed along Beijing's traffic-choked roads, in order to make it "more convenient" for citizens to appreciate the art. Below, He Zhenliang, chairman of the International Olympic Committee's Commission for Culture and Olympic Education, tells the media it's the first time that the IOC has given its patronage to such an event.