Passage A

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 performance and its underlying meaning. Far from destroying the value of sports, as some cultural critics have argued, the attendance of spectators is often necessary to a sporting event. Indeed one of the virtues of contemporary sports lies in their resistance to the erosion of standards and their capacity to appeal to a knowledgeable audience. Norman Podhoretz has argued that the sports public remains more discriminating than the public for the arts and that in sports "excellence is relatively uncontroversial as a judgment of performance." The public for sports still consists largely of people who took part in sports during 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, for many, is novelty and shock value, which in a jaded time often resides in a work's sheer ugliness or banality. In sport, on the other hand, novelty and rapid shifts of fashion play only a small part in its appeal to a discriminating audience.

Passage B

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 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 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 find beautiful looks as if it had a purpose." A triple axel in figure skating or a double play in baseball clearly has no function outside the sport. And yet such actions give a distinct ''impression of purposiveness." They are beautiful to behold because they appear both carefully calibrated and perfectly natural.