By now I hope the problems here are obvious. Hessenius notes at the linked essay that “The heart of the sports complex support over the past fifty years has been the farm team system,” and that the arts have lessons to learn from that fact. I can only speak for visual art, but there the continuity between the creative acts we engaged in as children and what goes on in the lofty regions of the professional world, by design, have little or nothing to do with each other. A painter I know in grad school — someone deeply thoughtful about materials and surfaces — was told by his department head a couple of months ago that she thought it was important to transcend the romantic idea of the artist working alone in his studio and contemplate how to become a better global citizen. Art that succeeds in doing this sort of thing, or appearing to do this sort of thing, wins praise for raising serious questions about this issue or that one.
Baseball hasn’t spent a hundred years smashing its own conventions. Baseball players don’t endeavor to turn hitting into a critique of late capitalism. Baseball doesn’t call upon fans to comprehend discussion full of coinages by PhD students trying to impress their dissertation committees, or implicitly punish them for having bourgeois values. Audiences instinctively and rightly hate this kind of pretentiousness.
Franklin Einspruch, “Why Sports Are Surging But the Arts Are Not”, Artblog.net, 2016-07-15.
March 6, 2018
QotD: Baseball versus modern art
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