I.

The last 100 years have seen developments in the world of art that have led to certain reactionary critics to proclaim ‘Is it art?’ in the pages of journals and newspapers. We have decided to take this idea through to its most radical and illogical conclusion; FOOTBALL IS NOW ART. Football is the purest mode of artistic expression and as an art form it reaches out to more people then art could ever hope too. Have you ever seen 40,000 people in a stadium devoted to pure pictorial or conceptual art? Football is populism and that doesn’t have to be a dirty thing.

We are tired of elites of all sorts. How can we ever hope to do something new if we segregate ourselves away from the ideas of the average man? This is the age of the common man and we must accept that. Art as a concept in itself is to be replaced with a multitude of new kinds of expression, taken out of the galleries and studios and into the stadia and training grounds. Art as a concept of itself as art is to be brought back to a new year zero; where everything becomes art, the walk home from university, pirate television or reading the newspaper. No more reactionary ‘Is it even ART?’ questions and then counter-reactionary ideas about how they are challenging the idea of ART itself. Art is not a concept to be challenged or debated, it merely is whatever you would like it to be; and here we declare that art is football and football is art.
We must pull art off its pedestal or picture hanging.

II.

Understand now that art is not something because you say it is, or because we or someone else says it is; art as a ‘something’ is to be replaced with art as ‘any thing’. We choose football; from football we can formulate our own theory of art.
Football is art at its most urgent and effective. Being temporal as opposed to rigid it forces its viewer to absorb it in one sitting (unlike the play, which we can mull over or put down in the form of its text; unlike the painting which we can consider at our own leisure; especially unlike the novel, that most unwieldy of forms). One exhilarating teleological narrative pours over the thousands of spectators physically present at its very sight of creation. During its consumption viewers have little time to discuss or interpret proceedings; this is left for after the game. Many choose to focus on direct interaction; “It’s a penalty, it’s a fucking penalty!”
Football is art at its most multifaceted and malleable, its narrative can take any course and its events can elicit any interpretation. Not only does a game of football have a narrative but it is a series of images; of theatre, dance and poetry; it combines all the artistic forms into a single sphere of artistic action and interaction that totally destroys preheld and prejudiced ideas about what art is and does. This action is art at its most kinetic, unpredictable and engaging.

III.

Within the stadia sit thousands of people who receive the art visually and react to it mentally, emotionally and even physically. The artist himself wishes this from the subject whom absorbs his work but has never been able to achieve this on such a scale. The chief artist or commissioner of the artist’s work in football is the chairmen or owner of the club. He needs the art on the pitch to provoke spectator reaction for financial reasons but is not simply a tactless and selfish miser. For him football becomes more than business; the seductive gamble first becomes a passion and then an obsession for some. Just like art an artist’s connection with their work. The football chairman is the art critic or art collector: necessary but also reactionary and dangerous.

On the pitch is where football is art at its most self-evident, the pinnacle of this art is the goal; delivered by a flick of the manager’s brush and a dab of color from an exotic ability. The goal when scored is experienced from different perspectives and the converse realities of thousands of people, all affected diversely by its incidence. Football is as art should be, dynamic, urgent and affecting: not neutralized by critics’ interpretations or pigeonholed by various schools of thought. There is no time for such pondering in the pandemonium (or dejection) following the goal scored or conceded.

Where theatre is contained and guided to its climax, football is unpredictable and erratic, but it is also the form of ultimate constraint; there is no time to go back and touch up mistakes, no time to rethink an ungainly idea; the art of football exists within the set parameters of two sets of forty-five minutes; nothing exists outside of this.

However it does exist outside of the purity of individual vision; it is a ‘game’ remember, a team game, all drama in football is the direct cause of a collective vision. Except it is vision influenced by fate, which produces the most human and ultimately the only REAL drama. It is Shakespearean tragedy, Beckettian delusion or despair and Chaplin-esque physicality.
Football is theatre as Bertolt Brecht had wanted it to be, the proletariat mans’ artistic arena. And what of the goalkeeper, that great fumbling existential DADA of football; if the goal scored is football’s ultimate artistic achievement then the goalkeeper is taking a white paint brush to the Mona Lisa every single time he plucks the ball out of the air, and he does it beautifully. The beauty of the constructed goal has more value to me than anything by the Dutch masters (except maybe Ajax, and total football).

Drawing endless comparisons between art and football does not further the argument that football is art. Football is art to us because art can be anything. Football is a valid art because to us, anything can be valid as art.
Long Live Football.