The art of sport

The art of sport - The Boston Globe: "Gumbrecht laments that most contemporary academic analyses of ''sport' as a cultural phenomenon tend to be socially patronizing, dismissive of sports fans as having fallen for a modern-day version of the old bread and circus treatment. Such thinkers, he argues, ''find it difficult to admit that the fascination with sports can have respectable roots in the realm of aesthetic appeal' more typically associated with the so-called high arts. Conditioned to look for aesthetic pleasure in a concert hall or museum, we fail to recognize that watching a tense seventh game of the World Series (or a championship fight or a 100-meter dash) might be considered a legitimate aesthetic experience as well."