From Free Agency to Captivity: Football and Spectacle in Contemporary Art

Abstract

In modern art, sport and athleticism was represented as an image of vitality, agency and aspiration. After WWII, artists increasingly developed bleak images of soccer, using motifs of media spectacle, surveillance, crowd violence and commercialisation to address significant social and political change in postmodern culture. Analysing the work of artists from Spain, UK, Australia and Jordan, this chapter argues that captivity and containment now dominate the metaphorical representations of soccer. Show more