"This is about team sports, each of which has a somewhat different appeal. Individual sports differ even more."
Well, yeah, but it turns out the french like bike racing, and the americans like football, and the dominicans like baseball....there's some cross between history and the particular sport....
But if I were to do some mapping between sports and the arts under capitalism, it wouldn't be on the basis of militarism or patriotism, it would be on the basis of spectacle and virtuosity: both sports and the arts under capitalism are passive spectator passtimes and I think especially art has suffered as a result.
Apropos of something else, I wrote the following to a friend:
"My grandfather hung his fiddle on a hook in the wall, and when he came home from work, he'd take it down and play the popular folk songs of his day. He was an amateur and his was a low art, but I think without his kind of art, there would be no art at all. Or, as the case is with us today, art would either be a corporate-manufactured commodity, a form of sleep; or it would be A rt: passively and ignorantly watched by people needing to demonstrate their social credentials, but unable to enjoy or appreciate or participate in what they witness.
I think without low art there can be no high art. All of Bach's gigues, and gavottes, and minuets, and pavannes started on the dance floor. And I think the people who happily revelled in Prague, humming arias from Figaro, did so because nearly all of them could pluck a string, or sing a song, or play a flute. Low art is what we can all participate in: singing, dancing, playing an instrument. The industrial revolution put an end to all that; it put an end to the leisure required to learn an instrument (even badly); it put an end to growing up with bird song; and thereby put an end to the feeling that music helps us participate in a meaningful universe. The spheres became silent. What filled the silence was virtuosity and circus acts; and really, when you compare nineteenth and eighteenth century music, you cannot help feeling that music had become more spectacular but cruder. What magic remains (Chopin) could only be accomplished in small strokes. (Is Mahler an exception?)
Certainly art requires craft, technique, endless practice; but in and of themselves these are insufficient. Would there have been a Shakespeare without the low art of the commedia del arte which preceded him?"
As the car took over, and social spaces have closed down, there has also been a lot less opportunity to just go out and kick a ball around -- it's all vicarious now. And that passivity feels completely natural under capitalism because it's the passivity we normally enforce upon ourselves to do our (alienated) work.
It's really quite amazing to watch Greg Louganis do a dive, or Nadia Comanici on the uneven bars (this really dates me), but I would trade that all in for an unalienated existence.
Joanna