Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T02:43:19.944Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Sport and the Artistic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

S. K. Wertz
S. K. Wertz
Affiliation:
Texas Christian University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Recently David Best has advanced the claim that sport is not an art form, and that although sport may be aesthetic, it is not artistic. Such a claim is false and runs counter to ordinary usage and sport practice. On behalf of sport practice, let me cite as an example the world-class Canadian skater, Toller Cranston, who thinks there are such things as ‘artistic sports, those being gymnastics, diving, figure skating’. (I might add trampolining and power- or weight-lifting to this category.) Best claims that athletes like Cranston are conceptually confused and that they endow sport with greater respectability than should be allowed. Ascribing the predicate ‘artistic’ to sport performances reflects ‘barbarous usage’. Why does Best exclude the artistic from the realm of sport? Upon examination of his argument, one finds that this exclusion derives mainly from his concepts of art and sport. He thinks that art has a subject-matter, a content, and that sport does not. Sport is contentless, so ‘sport’ and ‘art’ are two logically distinct regions. But is this so? Are we to accept Best's argument or are we to listen to accomplished, reflective athletes in the area of artistic sports? It seems the most reasonable analytic procedure would be to listen to Cranston's case and decide whether such a piece of intentionalist criticism5 should override Best's premises.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy , Volume 60 , Issue 233 , July 1985 , pp. 392 - 393
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1985

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 David, Best, The Aesthetic and the Artistic, Philosophy 57 (July 1982), 357–372. This article is an expanded version of his ‘Art and Sport’, Journal of Aesthetic Education 14 (April 1980), 69–80.Google Scholar

2 Ruth Saw first saw the necessity of including ‘sports’ under the classification of ‘a work of art’. See her essay, ‘What is a Work of Art?’, Philosophy 36 (January 1961), 18–29; reprinted in her Aesthetics: An Introduction (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co., 1971), 27–50.Google Scholar

3 Toller, Cranston, Goals Before Golds, in Sport in Perspective, Partington, John T. et al. (eds) (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada: ISSP 5th World Sport Psychology Congress, 1982), 19.Google Scholar

4 4 Op. cit., note 1, p. 364.

5 For the sake of argument, 1 construe Cranston's remark as a piece of intentionalist criticism. I shall here ignore the objections mounted against this kind of criticism–see, e.g., George, Dickie, Aesthetics: An Introduction (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1971), Ch. 12. I think there are adequate replies by Frank Cioffi, ‘Intention and Interpretation in Criticism’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 64 (1963), 85–106; and more recently by Colin Radford and Sally Minogue, The Nature of Criticism (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1981), 20, 113, 127–129, etc.Google Scholar

6 For further discussion of this topic, see my A Response to Best on Art and Sport, Journal of Aesthetic Education 18 (1984); and ‘Artistic Creativity in Sport’, in Sport Inside Out: Readings in Literature and Philosophy, David L. Vanderwerken and Spencer K. Wertz (eds) (Fort Worth, Texas, USA: Texas Christian University Press, 1984).Google Scholar