I enjoy the Olympics despite the scores

[jducoeur]

One observation from last night: it reminded me, once again, that I find the judging and scoring to be my one real beef with the figure skating.

This time, there was a skater (didn't catch where from) whose routine was based on Gene Kelly's classic number from An American in Paris. For my money, it was brilliant: not just good skating, but good nods to the original routine peppered throughout. He actually managed to get a bunch of little nuances of Kelly's movement idiom in there -- not easy when you're moving on teeny little blades at high speed.

Of course, the commentators were full of, "Oh, it's not very hard; it won't score well; blah blah blah". And that proved true -- from a scoring POV, it was mediocre. Which is a damned shame, because from a purely artistic POV (as opposed to an athletic one), I thought it completely stole the show.

This seems to happen about once in each Winter Olympics for me. Sometimes it's a solo, sometimes a pair, but there's always *somebody* who just clearly gets the idea of Skating As Dance, and as Art, far better than the rest of the field. And they *never*, ever, win...

Comments

[rickthefightguy.livejournal.com]

Very politely put, but I beg to disagree. Athletic and Sporting are not synonyms. There are a lot of very athletic endeavors that are not sports. Unless Art and Sport are synonyms, since most of the best professional athletes I know are artists. It takes great skill and coordination to do a 35' high fall (I know, I have done them many times). But that isn't even an art - it is just an athletic job, that is part of the art form of film making (and very occasionally live theatre).

Now these days the olympics are, no doubt, a collection of athletic events. Some of those events are sports, and some are competitive art forms. Is competitive swing dance a sport? It is athletic and competitive. But my feeling, as I said, is that there is a real difference between competitive athletic events like figure skating and swing dance, where professional judges disagree constantly (which is why we have to take a consensus and the consensus frequently disagrees with a large number of the other observers), and sports, where the winner is the one who ran the swiftest, jumped the highest, or lifted with the most strength.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

I think you've hit upon an interesting distinction. But isn't it more of a spectrum than a simple either/or?

For instance, I think most people would accept that baseball and football are sports -- yet they have umpires and referees making judgment calls.

On the other hand, Scott McCloud, in _Understanding Comics_, proposes a theory of Art that definitely includes most Sport. IIRC, "Art is any activity not directly related to survival or reproduction." Rather broad, but I often find it useful.

[rickthefightguy.livejournal.com]

I sidejacked your first two comment on this to a comment below btw.

Though McCloud's definition is lovely, (and I like his work from what I have seen of it - isn't he the guy who did the 'closure' strip you have on your mantle?) it doesn't agree with my definition (if I had one) in that it includes a lot of things that I would bar, like reading livejournal, and especially facebook, playing video games (though creating them does fit in my definition), and blowing out candles on a birthday cake, to name 3 of the millions of things that people do that are not directly related to survival or reproduction. And of course survival is related to reproduction, in a prerequisite sort of way, and reproduction to survival in a species sort of way. And also, for professional artists, art _is_ directly related to survival, and come to that, in a species sort of way art is necessary to survival, and .... on and on. Lovely sentiment, but it doesn't stand up to any real thought for me.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Yes, the "Closure" piece is from that book.

And I admit that his definition is too radical to stand up all the time. But it does present an interesting perspective that, as I said, I often find useful.