Art, Sports, & Evanescence

We used to look at the Arts differently: there were the arts like painting and sculpture which were displayed in galleries and museums, there were material objects that took up space and would be there for our children to gaze upon in their time. The performing arts were evanescent and disappeared after a performance, and there were only writings and reminiscences to be had, like the dinner party guests in Joyce's The Dead talking about the great opera singers past.
Sports are very much like the performing arts, except that Sports is more probabilistic; the outcomes are more random. Ballet is Ritual, whereas Basketball can be nearer to chaos... more like Improv!
We live in a time when we may record performances and may listen to them and look at them again and again. They may very well still be there for our children to view. This is a great difference from the past. Just last year I watched the most recent restoration of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and it changed me. I had seen it before, but without the sequences at the night club, which were among the footage found in Argentina. These sequences gave a richer flavor of Weimar to the film, or at least more of the Weimar Republic iconography that we are accustomed to.
It also made me aware that there was a mute and ominous prescience there: in the battle between labor and capital we saw the possible alternatives:  (1) capital maintains its autocratic rule, or (2) labor revolts and destroy the old, or (3) they come together in harmony.
I realized that it was the outcome not shown that actually occurred: the National Socialist revolution and all that flowed from it.

It was that which could not be rationally idealized nor fancifully imagined that was the reality to come, yet had I not viewed the ideal of labor and capital coming together in harmony in Lang's film, I would never have grasped the terrible alternative #4 it in its atrocious irony.

What other performance would have inspired this idea in me? Where would there be the learned forum devoted to Fritz Lang's ideas had there been no cinema? I realized that great artists inspire us by what they miss, as well as what they hit. And my commentary on Nazism as the ironic outcome missed by Metropolis is a creation by Lang and me, assisted by the film conservators and critics through time.

How in the name of heaven do we see something like El Laborinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth) and not be changed forever? It resonates, and now it will resonate as long as there is a copy. The record of performance extends art and artistry immensely. How can we ignore it? It will not disappear as did performances in the past. If we are oblivious, it will come back to haunt us! And it will tell its myth to our children and grandchildren, and they may understand us by a community of emotion through the generations.

And mentioning Sports again, perhaps the most interesting exhibit of performance art ( or sports ) made permanent was the film Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 which I saw last year also: arts and sports together; performing artistry and athleticism made enduring for generations.

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To be clear, I consider Sports to be part of the Great Universe of Art: structured and rehearsed physical behaviors which are complex and more chaotic than other such arts, as Ballet. Sports is to Ballet as Pollock was to Painting.
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