2018 NBA Playoffs Column 1: ART

[April 17th, 2018]Woah woah hold on, good lord we out here talkin' about KAWHI LEONARD in NEW YORK CITY rehabbing. #popbyke now. beard all day Rocket dae know what they're doing???? TRUST THE PROCESS Gabrielle Union Quinn Cook  It's NBA time at Forget the Protocol baby. It's the best sports around town. it do be like that. too petty.After all:https://twitter.com/World_Wide_Wob/status/986105014753157120Art. Can sports be art? "This shit is art."What ecosystem leads to such a statement?"This shit is art." It's a dumb, oxymoronic statement from a repetitive account[note]@World_Wide_Wob is, of course, a "thought leader" in the NBA Twittersphere[/note]. How can shit be art?I'm a "big tent" guy when it comes to art. Video games can be art. Clothing can be art. Sometimes, when I come across a particularly elegant scientific explanation, it feels like watching a painting. Sports can be art. Why not? This isn't 1888, a time when a bunch of English men could decide what was art and what was not. Art has, thankfully, been deconstructed.The NBA can certainly be art. Basketball can be aesthetically pleasing and meaningful to the soul. There is a reason Spike Lee made Hoop Dreams. There is a reason we constantly re-watch Vince Carter's Slam Dunk performance from 2000. Human achievement is intrinsically artistic. Perhaps it is easier to define what is not art. The "anti-art" of the Dadaists and the post-structuralists are still art. Of course, what they were trying to get at was it is not the absence or presence of style which makes art real; the emotion that art triggers gives it substance."Prayer and art are passionate acts of will. One wants to transcend and enhance the will’s normal possibilities. Art like prayer is a hand outstretched in the darkness, seeking for some touch of grace which will transform it into a hand that bestows gifts."Franz Kafka said that. Kafka resonates through the ages because no other writer understood what it meant to be devoid of art. To me, the essence of Kafka is the extirpation of art, emotion, and all that jazz. "The Trial" and "The Castle" shatter the human psyche through the devilish introduction of bureaucracies and higher powers. It shutters the mind to art.Basketball is art. The doomed, Kafkaesque world of American life that surrounds us is shit. Social media and modern Internet discourse lets us believe otherwise.Let's look at SB Nation's articles about the NBA today. SB Nation claims itself to be the "one-stop shop for the NBA Playoffs." Here's excerpts from an article by Kristian Winfield on Joel Embiid's latest Instagram post:And this:I'm pretty sure Kristian Winfield is a good writer who loves basketball. He writes 5-6 solid articles a day on the NBA. However, I have no idea whether he enjoys producing 500-800 words of copy on Joel Embiid's latest Instagram story. Maybe he does. But let's not kid ourselves, this shit is not art. An analysis of Joel Embiid's Instagram, (which read: "fucking sick and tired of being babied") inspires no great emotion in our minds[note]Is there anyone who has achieved true emotion from a ten-second Instagram/Snapchat story?[/note]. And yet, somehow, the market has decided that this deserves clicks and airspace. The NBA content machine, a cousin of the NFL content machine, has determined that an understanding of "fucking sick and tired of being babied" is worth my time.To be fair, the public at large is not fucking sick and tired of being babied. With the NBA now a nonstop source of drama and professional wrestling-style storylines, the public is eating nonsensical content and Instagram drama with reckless abandon. Is Kawai disgruntled? What about the daily life of Russell Westbrook? Kyrie flat earth back? WHAT ABOUT GORAN DRAGIC SCORING A MEANINGLESS LAYUP SO DISRESPECTFUL MY GAWD!Through the three days of watching the NBA Playoffs and observing the discourse on social media, I've discovered the following truths:

• People care about respect.
• People really care about disrespect.
• Everybody online thinks they are Zach Lowe.
• People who gamble seem to care about gambling more than mothers care about their children.

 Last night, I watched about 35 minutes of Sixers/Heat Game 2. It was not a pleasant viewing experience. The commercial breaks were agonizingly long. The Heat dominated most of the game, let the Sixers back in, and then Wade hit a few clutch shots to secure a win. The fourth quarter was like watching a very poorly cut edit of a Van Sant film. The Warriors/Spurs game was better, but it was just a normal NBA basketball game. Nothing expressly interesting happened. David West rolled his ankle. Steph Curry didn't play. The Spurs couldn't hit the broad side of a barn. I can barely write anything about the games themselves. And yet this night, this banal night of NBA basketball, deserved a Tweet arguing that "THIS SHIT IS ART."And it is art. The Golden State Warriors in full flight can certainly be seen as art. But you wouldn't tweet "this shit is art" unless you somehow believed that you have the keys to what is art and what isn't. And since @World_Wide_Wob is a prominent NBA Twitter account with an ESPN show, that means that he is contributing to art. He believes that he is an artist, in some respect. He believes that tweets like this:https://twitter.com/World_Wide_Wob/status/985612161023184898are art, in some bizarre manner. But..it's not. How can it be art? I think tennis is an artistic sport. To me, most tennis matches are not art[note]ESPECIALLY DURING CLAY SEASON[/note], but I guess you can see it that way. This random NBA playoff game that everyone will forget in two months can certainly be art, as a stretch. The NBA Twitter-verse is not art. Social media is not art. Writing derivative pieces and getting #madonline is not art. It's Kafka. It's thought control. It's a looming nightmare of constant contact and invasion of privacy that we permit in order to save us from reality. Horrendous comment sections and Twitter accounts like this that use obscenity and shock to destroy the human psyche are not art.I'm aware that I'm guilty of deciding what is art and what is decidedly not art. I know it sounds arrogant and cocky. But if art is like prayer than sentences like this, from the top of today's SB Nation page...Or posts like this...make me feel a sense of late capitalistic dread. The elaborate obsession pettiness is too much. To distill this rambling article into a sentence, the NBA social media hive is a truly kafkaesque mess of unintelligible media that drives logic into the sewers.And of course, I am guilty of liking it, at some level. I like it in the moment, when I'm watching the game and I see a highlight video and stupidly laugh. I'm not fucking sick and tired of being babied either. But the NBA Twitter-verse makes me miserable. Or it makes me look like a fam. Allez.