Didn't Picasso win a gold?
P

-----Original Message-----
From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Roger Day
Sent: 21 August 2008 07:44
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Sport v art

The way the Greeks approached Art & Sport and the way we approach art
& sport must be fundamentally different. I think the way the Greeks
approached art & sport was on a more equivalent basis than we do now.
Art, since the Greeks, has taken on several layers of meaning;
elevating art to the level of Art buttressed by Theory. And also, in
each case, money, which enlarges and distorts and produces markets.
I'm not sure that sport - and most of the sports we see now have only
been around for about a 100 years - has taken on an equal amount of
cultural theory. However, I can hear the antithesis arguments being
played out every time an Opera House goes for a public grant. I can
see both sides of the argument, particularly at the youth level.

The connections of art to sport for the Greeks, may have been a
simpler matter. I can only imagine what Pindar might make of the
Olympic, with it's thousand of beautiful people, the perfections but
also the distortions of the body produced by the modern demands of
art. I wonder what he'd make of the 100,000 condoms that have been
supplied to the Olympic village, particularly when they go for a
re-supply?

You don't have to be a cook to be a restaurant critic, but at least
most critics have cooked an omellete. So there's a certain irony in
calling own Deleuze on sport, or even our discussing it. But not
having played or indulged in it does mean you miss the subtler
elements.

Sport can be more than craft; Poetry is a craft, but sometimes one is
elevated towards something higher. Sometimes, at the point where a
great player pulls something out his or hers magic hat, you think,
"how the hell did he do that?" It goes beyond mere rote, a whole field
of spatial awareness and physical harmony, that the body does nearly
all the thinking. As Alison said, improvisation. Humans do this all
the time; it is the ghost in the machine which operates the levers,
not the conscious mind. Sportsmen and women raise this to a level we
can only guess it. Football players are notorious for not being that
intelligent; and it's true. You don't pay Wayne Rooney to write iambic
pentameter.

That's it, i have to go to work.

Roger

On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 12:31 AM, Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> I would never argue that sport & art are _the same thing_. I would
> argue (and probably have already - I'm beginning to repeat myself and
> will stop soon) that sport is about much more than who wins and that,
> like art, there are sublime moments when it exceeds its contexts.
> Those pseudo-religious tv images aren't entirely bullshit: and when
> you thinks of sports like Kendo or Ninjutsu, or Budo Taijutsu, or how
> the ancient Greeks lauded their athletes, I think it's clear that
> there are cultural contexts that are about much more than zero sum
> competitiveness (which is always ugly when you see it). And it's that
> excess that still moves people, for all the surrounding material. I
> hear commentators (well, not Australian commentators) talking about
> beauty all the time.
>
> I don't really care who wins most of the time, I watch sport for
> different reasons. I can't be that weird. Athletes tell me too that
> elite competitors are not competing with others, essentially: the
> major competition is with one's own limitations. You can absolutely
> see that in the best athletes. Truth is, I've learned a fair bit about
> making art from watching sport. And I failed sport miserably at
> school, always the person chosen last for teams...
>
> xA
>
> On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 1:57 AM, Douglas Barbour
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> Ah, well, I'd agree with Heraclitus there too, but I can go back to that
>> writing, or that recording of that music, or that thing on the wall, &
if,
>> of course, my experience is always changing it still has something to do
>> with what went before...?
>>
>> Now knowing a thing about cricket & not having spent much time with
>> baseball, I can't speak to those. The sports I do watch, sometimes with
>> pleasure sometimes not, well, I think the kind of surge of wanting one
team
>> or person to win is different from what happens with various arts. I wont
>> say these emotions are lesser, on some 'hierarchy of authenticity' but
will
>> suggest that they aren't exactly the same (which might also be
'Heraclitan'
>> of me). or example, the tension I felt watching, say the diving the other
>> night, & hoping that the Canadian could pull off all his dives, is
perhaps
>> analogous to a tension thriller authors would like to conjure in their
>> readers, but I'm not at all sure it's the same thing, the investment,
etc,
>> however constructed...
>>
>> Doug
>>
>> On 19-Aug-08, at 3:44 PM, Alison Croggon wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Douglas - Well, I'd get all Heraclitan here and claim that you
>>> can't return to any poem, since it will be different next time! But
>>> I've argued this in depth before, in my poem _On Lyric_.
>>>
>>> I'm not sure how you distinguish between different kinds of feeling.
>>> It sounds like a kind of hierarchy of authenticity to me (art produces
>>> real feeling, sport produces the illusion of producing feeling). If
>>> meaning is what distinguishes sport from art, how is Swan Lake more
>>> (or less) meaningful than a game of cricket? (This is a real question,
>>> not a rhetorical gesture) - I have to say that the more I think about
>>> it, the less clear it seems to me -
>>
>> Douglas Barbour
>> [log in to unmask]
>>
>> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
>>
>> Latest books:
>> Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
>> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
>> Wednesdays'
>>
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.h
tml
>>
>> A little planet blues, for the
>> deathwatch.
>> A season of rictus riffs.
>>
>>                        Dennis Lee
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
> Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
>



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