Full Description
The world's most popular sport, soccer, has long been celebrated as "the beautiful game" for its artistry and aesthetic appeal. Picturing the Beautiful Game: A History of Soccer in Visual Culture and Art is the first collection to examine the rich visual culture of soccer, including the fine arts, design, and mass media. Covering a range of topics related to the game's imagery, this volume investigates the ways soccer has been promoted, commemorated, and contested in visual terms. Throughout various mediums and formats—including illustrated newspapers, modern posters, and contemporary artworks—soccer has come to represent issues relating to identity, politics, and globalization. As the contributors to this collection suggest, these representations of the game reflect society and soccer's place in our collective imagination. Perspectives from a range of fields including art history, sociology, sport history, and media studies enrich the volume, affording a multifaceted visual history of the beautiful game.
Contents
Introduction
Picturing the Beautiful Game
Daniel Haxall
Part One: Soccer and Mass Media
1. From the Oval to the Crystal Palace: the FA Cup final and its depiction in the Victorian illustrated press
Alexander Leese
2. "Hours and hours of mundane moments and then you get this": Motion and Punctuality in the Soccer GIF
Luke Healey
Part Two: Soccer and Memory
3. Making a Spectacle of Ourselves: Imaging the Supporter at Football and the Fine Arts
Mike O'Mahony
4. The Boss in Bronze: Three Statues of Brian Clough
Christopher Stride, Ffion Thomas, and Nick Catley
Part Three: Soccer and Modernism
5. The Footballer as the Figure of the New Man in Italian and Russian Avant-Garde, 1910s-1930s
Przemyslaw Strozek
6. From Free Agency to Captivity: Football and Spectacle inContemporary Art
Chris McAuliffe
Part Four: Soccer and Gender
7. Feminist Art and Women's Soccer
Jennifer Doyle
8. Gender, Pleasure, and the Look: Female Fans and Men's Soccer
Carrie Dunn
Part Five: Soccer and Global Politics
9. The Politics of Soccer in Contemporary Ghanaian Art
Daniel Haxall
10. Adventures of the Triolectic: Art, Politics and Three-Sided Football
Christopher Collier
Part Six: Soccer and Commercialism
11. Over 100,000 Posters: the Unprecedented Commercialism of the 1966 World Cup in England
Jean Williams
12. Imagining Realty: Critical Responses to the Commercialization of the Beautiful Game
Ray Physick
