I love art and music above all other things, but I am also known to travel to the other end of San Francisco just to watch a footie match with fellow Dutch supporters. Seriously, you should have seen my elation on Saturday at van Nistelrooy's amazing header in the last five minutes of the Netherlands/Russia game turn into slumped-over-the-bar depression when Russia fired two more goals in at the end of extra time. But I digress. My point is that the gap between art and sport appreciation might not actually be that vast, and the Guardian put this theory to the test recently when they sent their arts writers to watch some sport and their sport writers to look at some art. Steve Bierley (above), who normally covers tennis, went to the Pompidou to review an exhibit by Louise Bourgeois and found himself longing for the familiarity of the French Open:
Outside the gallery, on a looped video, Bourgeois speaks about her art as if she were giving a talk to the Llansilin Women's Institute. It should have carried a warning: This woman is deeply dangerous. I go back to the comfort of Roland Garros, though Bourgeois remained a haunting and disturbing presence. I'm still spooked.
I think that's the same reaction I had the first time I confronted Bourgeois's work myself, as much as I love her now. On the flip side of the arts/sport swap rock critic Caroline Sullivan took on that most British of sports, cricket:
If ever there were a sport invented to alienate the casual onlooker,
it's cricket. What is the appeal of a game that grinds on for five
days, has an arcane vocabulary of "wickets" and "overs" and "LBWs" and
forces its fans to sit in sodden stadiums for seven hours at a stretch?
To me, an American, it seems to be one of those "pleasures" that Brits
revel in to reinforce their reputation as connoisseurs of the
inexplicable and the eccentric. As a rock critic, the only parallel I
can think of is a Tindersticks gig I recently saw: it was slow-moving,
went on for about a year and the audience sat in mute absorption all
the way through, like they'd been poleaxed.
I've never attempted either a cricket match or a Tindersticks show myself, and Kennedy's comparison only manages to pique my curiosity. Overall, however, many of the participants found much to appreciate in that which was previously unfamiliar to them, theater critic Michael Billington going so far as to call for more cross-over between genres:
We all know there is plenty of drama in sport. So why isn't there more
sport in drama? It is time to break down the traditional barriers and
recognise the deep affinity between competitive games and the pleasing
patterns of art. The late Johnny Speight once described ballet, with
shocking political incorrectness, as "poof's football". We may deplore
Speight's language, but deep down he had a point.
It helped for the purposes of this experiment that the Guardian employs some of the best writers in the business no matter what their topic, as I've found in the past I'll enjoy even a book about NASCAR as long as the prose is good. Enjoy the many puzzled facial expressions from the sports journalists in a gallery here (including a glimpse of SF's own Davies Symphony Hall), and from the arts critics here. Also don't miss the video of dance critic Judith Mackrell trying to figure out what horse to bet on at the Epsom Derby and ultimately going totally gaga for the gorgeous animals, and of adorable rugby columnist Thomas Castaignède thoroughly reveling in his night out at the opera. I'd be his date for Puccini any day. After all, I used to play rugby too.