Athletic Performances

Passage

In all games, particularly in athletic contests, the central importance of display and representation serves as a reminder of the ancient connections between play, ritual, and drama. The players not only compete, they enact a familiar ceremony that reaffirms common values. Ceremony requires witnesses: enthusiastic spectators conversant with the rules of the childhood and thus acquired a sense of the game and a capacity to make discriminating judgments.

The same can hardly be said for the audience of an artistic performance, even though amateur musicians, dancers, actors, and painters may still comprise a small nucleus of the audience. Constant experimentation in the arts, in any case, has created so much confusion about standards that the only surviving measure of excellence, shifts of fashion play only a small part in its appeal to a discriminating audience.

Passage

Hans Gumbrecht argues persuasively that many great moments in sport are beautiful, in the full aesthetic sense of the word. 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 to recognize that watching a well-played sporting event might be a legitimate aesthetic experience as well.

Gumbrecht grounds his argument in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment. At the center of Kant's writings on aesthetics is his conception of the ''beautiful" as paradoxically related to ''purposiveness." The paradox, as recounted by Gumbrecht, is that although ''something does not need to have a purpose in order to be beautiful…whatever we of purposiveness." They are beautiful to behold because they appear both carefully calibrated and perfectly natural.