Sports and art

Both sports and art are about pushing boundaries. But what pleases the public in sports, tends to irritate the arts. Artists seem to do nothing, or they cross borders just to shock us. That’s clearly never the intention in sports — athletes know very well what they’re doing and while some sports may shock some (kickboxing, for example), that’s not what that sport started about. On the other hand, everyone can name a few (so-called) works of art that obviously seem to have no other purpose than to shock the public. What role do boundaries play in sport and art? Why do athletes and artists go to the hole, and which hole is that actually? Pushing boundaries and if you want to know more about hand-painting art, you can visit for more details about what art materials do you need.

Art Forms

The boundaries of art are of a completely different nature. Rather, they are habits and conventions; and styles inherited from art history. They serve to generate meanings, but not as straitjackets that cannot be tampered with. There are also no referees who can arbitrate in the event of differences of opinion. In fact, artists have to be original and for that, they will have to do something that is different from what others did. In art, there is a premium on the deviation. That applies to all art forms. But that difference is limited. A new poem should at least resemble a poem—however different it may be from the poems we already know. The rules of the art are actually the rules of the art forms. When is something a painting? When it consists of paint on a flat surface. That paint can be of all kinds: oil, acrylic, watercolor; although in the latter case you speak of gouaches and rather call it a drawing. The surface can be more or less flat. Julian Schnabel first glued porcelain to his canvas and painted it, but when such a deviation becomes three-dimensional and no longer shows a two-dimensional surface, we call it a sculpture. So you can think of transitions between all art forms — somewhere in the middle, it becomes one then something else.

PERFORMANCE ART

We can perhaps make the difference clearer by comparing the sport to performance art, an art form that at first glance looks a bit like sport. More in any case than poetry or painting. In both sports and performance art, there is an inherent value in going to certain extremes and pushing your limits. Performances are often about the stretch in the artist himself: how much pain can a person endure? Here the artist himself is the work. She has formulated a rule for herself and will follow it to the extreme. The rule of performance is therefore completely one-off. However, football matches all follow the same rules.

Artistic Innovation

• Implication Art
  The performances I mentioned above are also instances of Implication Art, an art form in which the works put members of the public to work with something they actually have moral objections to. You don’t want to witness Burden’s Shoot of Abramowic’ Rhythm 0, do you? A more recent example of this is Marco Evaristtis Helena & El Pescador, a work consisting of a few blenders with goldfish (and water) in them, the plugin the socket. The viewer feels invited to switch on the blender and puree the fish, but usually does not do this, for moral reasons. However, to prevent someone with fewer scruples from still mashing the fish, one is actually obliged to pull the plug from the socket. But they don’t do that either, because this is a work of art and you don’t destroy works of art.
• Experiments
  And sometimes they want to hit us directly, but they don’t really know how to do that. For example, in 2000, a woman called the London police during the morning rush hour and reported that she had placed three bombs in the four underground stations below London City. She said no more, she put the receiver on it. The police took the report seriously and evacuated the subways, the streets, and the buildings directly above — a loss of millions for many. At 11 a.m., the woman walked into the police station and reported that it was a work of art. Or take Gregor Schneider, who placed an appeal on the internet in April 2008 inviting dying people to undergo their final battle in the gallery. Schneider wants art to deal with death as well—by literally exhibiting the death of individuals.