Sport is certainly vulnerable to these things. And it's hard not to
understand the resentments when you see the Olympics in Britain
swallowing up the arts budget, resulting in, say, the closure of
Howard Barker's Westling School or various publishers... but I still
think ti's a false opposition. When you look at the Hollywood machine,
it's hard to see a lot of difference: the same mass entertainment
corporate ideologies are at work there, maybe working more insidiously
and with less chance of subversion precisely because meaning is what
is being controlled, whereas in sport there is still the naked act
inside all its signifiers. There are novelists working hard on product
placement or phalanxes of ghost writers making up fictional chicklit
authors, churning out the pink bestsellers with market researchers at
their elbows. Maybe Trugo is the poetry of sport...
xA
On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 4:56 PM, Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> One more and then I should stop...
>
> <snip>
> passivity is less to do with sport itself than with the consumerist
> economies around it (to be like one's favourite sports hero, one just
> buys the nike shoes, etc). Stephen's point about the politics of
> post-colonialism is another issue that plays here. [AC]
> <snip>
>
> I suppose my underlying prejudice is that sport may be more vulnerable to
> those pressures than, for example, the arts. That may seem an odd thing to
> say in an era where some paintings cost the equivalent of the annual GDP of
> one of the smaller third world economies. However, I think that the
> discourse generated and/or constituted by even the visual arts allows more
> chance for subversion.
>
> Stephen's coaching examples are telling, though. (So are Roger's re:
> participation and elites.) None of the answers is simple and few, if any,
> are certain.
>
--
Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
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