Not a secret many sports enthusiasts probably aren’t much interested in art, whereas art people are apt to express seething resentment about the entire sports establishment, the adulation of athletes, the piles of money. It’s an uneasy relationship. Still we’re all just people. We want the same stuff no matter what form it comes in, and it’s only in the manner of delivery where conflict lies.
Human competition, we compare all things, ranges from grisly mortal combat to slow games of chess, yet the same values pertain at all levels. We like to see fair, so rules are written and games are devised so that certain human attributes rise to the surface. From our comfortable couches we admire courage and selflessness, which are often totally separate from athletic ability. Honesty is enforced, and just this morning’s paper reports a basketball player’s pocket-change fine for feigning contact for advantage, later detected on slo-mo replay. One reason even thoughtful people follow sports is for this apparent transparency, all about a contest with the same rules they once played by, at some level, growing up.
While newspapers seem to evaporate day by day, sports sections remain robust with three or four feature writers banging away with insight and information. These folks aren’t cheerleaders because readers would soon lose interest. They’re contentious with coaches, second guess athletic directors, and minutely analyze the mumbled interviews of the teen-age participants. Their job is to provide access and understanding for a public interested in more than just a scoreboard summary. It isn’t just about winning and the public tends to encourage an underdog. Fans are said to be fickle, mainly because they idolize an abstract ideal and not the athlete who embodies it momentarily, and it’s in these heroic terms they’d prefer to see their own lives. What’s so wrong with that?
Politics and business aren’t subject to the same objectivity and the editorial opinions in the paper can hardly can be tested by the real experience of an average reader. Where else can those tests of endurance and determination, dedication and accomplishment be documented for all the world to see besides in the championship finals of some made up sport? Art embodies all those attributes we admire with the distinct advantage of being tangible, ownable, and only gaining in significance as years roll by instead of fading into a cloud of statistics and tattered memories. It isn’t a matter of changing values. It’s about finding them in a more thoughtful mode, one that humanizes the nest and makes the business day more palatable. Learning to recognize those universal human aspirations in art takes much less effort and memorization than following the most humble sports franchise, and understanding accumulates quickly. Looking at all the art available and knowing something about how it’s made and who makes it are all it takes.
1 comment:
Well said! The day job that I'm retiring from this year at the public library has given me a place to closely observe the decline and the fall of the newspaper. To use your words, modern newspapers and a great many periodicals are trapped in the maze of dead end commercialism and seem to have no interest in leaving it or awareness of their coming death.
As an artist, my biggest competitor with the art I've hung on a display wall is a little black screen in someone's face. Even at the Barnes and Noble show I had last year with paintings that popped all the way from the other end of the store a surprising number of people wouldn't look up from their screens. The ones who did actually looked at the work contacted me and bought the work for the homes. In talking to them, it didn't take long to see that they wanted my paintings or the collages for the reasons I hoped they would. The emotional/spiritual connection between the person and the art I hoped for was made. It was quite encouraging.
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