The Sports Show

The Sports Show – Save your $8 admission fee. This show at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts is wholly superfluous. With a couple of video installation exceptions, the show consists of dramatic photographs taken at sporting events. Most sports are so intrinsically photogenic – it seems virtually impossible to take a bad picture of a boxing match – that each week, a thousand museum-quality images of football, basketball, diving, etc. are produced by anonymous photojournalists. The Sports Show simply collects some examples of this work, adds some tendentious wall captions, and cordons off a couple of dark corners for some video – TV images that are not different in kind or quality than something you could see any night on ESPN. Like war, sport is a human activity that is fundamentally picturesque – but, as with battle, the images don’t convey the essence of the thing. Sport involves competition and drama, the “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” to borrow a slogan from a weekend television sports show of my youth – and competition, defeat and victory, are inimical to art. A still photograph doesn’t reveal who won, or why, or why the victory or loss was significant to the sportsmen and their fans. And so, in essence, still photographs, or fragments of video, are too abstract to convey much of anything than their formal “prettiness” – a quality that anyone with a high-speed camera and high-speed film can achieve simply by pointing the instrument at the competition. The stuff that is most fascinating in this show has nothing to do with sport per se – there is a wonderful interview between William F. Buckley and a cherubic Muhammed Ali that demonstrates with severe precision the distinction between facile cleverness (Buckley’s “braininess”) and the indescribable quality of greatness that the boxer embodies – Buckley purses his lips as if he is about to whistle and bobs his head around like a demented rooster and Ali, of course, is imperturbable. Curiously enough, a video-taped interview with O. J. Simpson shows something of that same indefinable quality that characterizes the kind of man that other men would like to be. But, alas,,any issue of Sports Illustrated is superior to this show.