Beautiful game

What do sports and art, or more precisely, football and art have in common? The idea behind the exhibition entitled The Beautiful Game is not to ponder about and draw parallels between football and art from an aesthetic point of view, but to present a selection of art projects in which football appears as a metaphor for things like power, money, the workings of the art system, the role of art in contemporary society, the identification with idols, social questions, etc. I have invited the collaboration of artists and curators who openly and without reservation admit something that is seldom heard in art circles: they are football devotees and they have, as a consequence, especially noted the numerous artworks that touch upon this subject. The selection process was dotted with individual suggestions from a great number of people in the field of art; in the end, the position of the assistant coach, to use sports terminology, was assumed by the artist Luchezar Boyadjiev. As we compiled information about the various works, a number of subtopics crystallized and dictated the final selection and the manner of presentation of the artworks. This exhibition merely outlines the basic premises of thinking about the possible links between football and art, while numerous interesting themes or comparisons are dealt with separately in the texts by the authors who have been invited to help produce the exhibition publication.

Thus, Jela Krečič writes about televising football and the spectacle of live transmissions of football matches; Viktor Bertoncelj about the impossibility of portraying football and its drama on film; Esad Babačić about a nostalgic supporter’s loyalty to one club and one club alone, even though it only plays in a local second league; Boštjan Narat about the importance of one of the elements of the match, singing – or being unable to sing – the national anthem; Ivan Čolović about supporters and hooligans that still present a major problem in the football industry, despite the measures taken; Goran Vojnović about comparisons between art and football or about the impossibility of bringing together these two worlds so diametrically opposed for some; Saša Nabergoj, on the other hand, writes about parallels that actually can link the two spectacles and their protagonists. The first text in the publication is by Lev Kreft: a concise reflection on the aesthetics of sports; a more profound study on the subject is his recently published book Levi horog (Left-handed sky hook).

Beautiful game

What do sports and art, or more precisely, football and art have in common? The idea behind the exhibition entitled The Beautiful Game is not to ponder about and draw ...