It's a whole new ballgame for sports art: collectors are beginning to see sports art as a wise investment

Art Business News, Sept, 2005 by Keith Pandolfi

While Perez feels there are too many artists creating sports art, Stern says it's difficult for those who want to paint popular sports figures to get into the business, since publishing such works requires dozens of licensing agreements that are often hard to negotiate. "A limited edition of someone like Kobe Bryant might require up to four licenses," he says. "You have to get permission from the National Basketball Association (NBA), the NBA Player's Association, the athletes themselves and sometimes the team." But, Stern says the SPS Limelight Agency has a strong relationship with such entities, since its sister company, Sports Placement Services, represents such high-caliber athletes as boxing legend Muhammad Ali and baseball great Sandy Koufax.

Another obstacle for sports art is that galleries are still reluctant to carry it, since it often has only limited--or sometimes local--appeal. A painting of famed Cincinnati Reds player Johnny Bench, for example, would probably fail to drum up much interest outside of the Greater Cincinnati area. But Soho's Burns says artwork related to more universal, non-franchised sports, such as golf or tennis, have more wide-ranging appeal. Thus, galleries are more willing to carry them. As a publisher, he says some galleries are willing to sell his company's sports art since Soho stands behind its artists 100 percent--"still, it's not as broad a market as Mediterranean landscapes or still lifes," he says.

However, SPS Limelight's Stern says that the popularity of sports art should continue to grow thanks to that quintessentially American phenomenon known as media rooms.

"They're getting bigger and bigger," he says. "After dropping $100,000 on the wiring and equipment, you want to decorate that room with something that honors all you put into it--and you're not going to tack posters up on the wall." Stern says artists like Holland are benefiting from a demand from those who want to decorate their media rooms with thoughtful depictions of their favorite catchers or quarterbacks.

Museums Take Notice

Increasing attention in the museum world might attest to the fact that today's sports artists aren't just depicting popular athletes, they are also grappling with deeper issues, such as the growing corporatism of the sports industry, the outrageously high salaries being paid to today's professional athletes, and America's often misguided obsession with stadium building, says Alyson Baker, who served as co-curator of the recent exhibit "Sport" at the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, NY. Baker says she was surprised when she started receiving artists' applications to appear in the show, which features 12 large-scale, sports-related sculptures. "They had a much more nostalgic take on the subject than I expected," she says. "Most of them harken back to another period of sports history. [The artists] are looking at sports with a sense of legend and heroism that's not being applied to contemporary sports."

In some of the works, the artists seem to be lamenting the faded glory of the sports world by depicting the meaninglessness of today's media-glazed version of it.