Finding Art's Masterpieces at the Olympics
LJ Rader shows off his love of Art & Sports by connecting viral moments with pieces of art in his brilliant social media account, Art But Make It Sports
When the bulge of French pole vaulter Anthony Ammirati knocked out his chance for a medal at the Paris Olympics, LJ Rader knew exactly what piece of art could illustrate the moment: a Fresco of Priapus, from the ancient city of Pompeii.
Priapus is a god of fertility in Greek mythology depicted with an oversized, permanently erect penis. In the Pompeii painting, his dick is on a scale, balanced by a large bag of coins. Both men, weighed down by their bulge, two thousand years apart.
“I’ve been waiting to use that image. It’s been in the banks for a long time,” LJ Rader told me recently. “If you're that guy, it's better than winning any medal. It's like, you're forever known as your package is big enough to knock you out of gold.”
This viral moment could be chalked up to tabloidy gawking. And the painting Rader paired it with could be ridiculous - ridiculous enough to get you to stop scrolling as you thumb across his account. But the way LJ Rader pairs moments in sports to artistic masterpieces is nothing short of brilliant.
And this is how Rader spends a lot of his spare time - by taking moments in sports and creatively pairing it with a work of art. His account, ArtButMakeItSports has grown to nearly half a million followers on X and 184k on Instagram. There, he is bringing art fans and sports fans together - bridging a divide and growing appreciation across the genres.
“I’m not a trained art historian… by any means.”
Rader, 34, grew up in Westchester, NY and had an early interest in art, which he credits to his grandparents, who would bring him to museums. But they also had “an insane artwork collection.”
“My grandpa’s family was pretty low-middle class, but they had this garage in the City and the artists that lived in the Village at the time would park there. And they didn’t have money to pay their bills, so they would give my grandma and grandpa artwork instead.”
Rader eventually started going to museums on his own. When he got to college, he considered minoring in art history, but ultimately took just one class and then decided to pursue it on his own.
His approach to art now is to visit “countless” museums and galleries, reading a lot of art books, and “falling down Wikipedia wormholes.”
“I probably go to museums and shows more than anybody else out there,” Rader said. “And I tend to see things through a sports lens.”
Sports is his other passion and his day job (he insists he’s made virtually no money from ArtButSports). At first, he was just posting snapshots of the art pieces he came across with funny references to sports. It was for his friends and a few followers. But then some big names started reposting him and the account, steadily, ballooned.
No AI in Sight
Rader insists that he doesn’t rely on any art-identifying technology or AI to make these connections.
“I do this to keep myself sharp,” he told me. “Which is funny when I get accused of using AI. It goes against the whole purpose of why I do this thing.”
His process always begins at a sporting event. If he’s watching a game and he sees a moment that could be iconic, he looks for a screenshot. (Now, with his huge following, he often gets tagged with these images, even when he isn’t watching the game.)
Then, he relies on his memory, his camera roll (where he stores 10k+ images he’s taken at museums), and his knowledge of art history.
If there’s an obvious parallel between a sports moment and a painting, he’ll pull it up.
“I have a pretty good memory and I’m very good at pattern recognition,” he said. “Oftentimes I can see this artist was influenced by this other artist, because I recognize this piece within the painting. But if you asked me to put artist’s names, I would have no idea, because I never learned about them verbally.”
But if the piece isn’t immediately recognizable, he tries to draw from what he knows about the artist’s use of color and emotion.
One of my favorite connections happened in late 2023. During a college football game, Syracuse coach Dino Baber’s shirt got pixelated and the camera picked up the grass field across his body instead. Rader remembered an artist he saw at the Whitney Museum a few years prior who loves to use a lot of green: Salman Toor.
“In that moment, it's like, all right, like, what are you playing off of? And you want to get that outline that matches the heavy green.”
(Toor’s heavy use of green is also helpful for Rader to illustrate a lot of Celtics games, he says.)
Rader’s favorite comparisons are the ones that aren’t immediately obvious and that he has to dig around to find the perfect side-by-side. An example of that is Michael Jordan’s “Blue Dunk” - a photograph of Jordan dunking from above, taken by Walter Iooss.
Rader was determined to find the right painting to do MJ and Iooss justice.
“There’s this bright blue playground from above. ‘Okay, what in the world could this be?’” He asks himself. He eventually landed on a Clyfford Still painting called “PH-923.” (Read more about Still on LJ’s substack)
“There are a few little things of it that are off, but at the bird’s eye view, this is perfect,” Rader told me. “And something like that is the must fun, where it’s not immediately recognizable.”
The Paris Olympics
I caught LJ while he was watching Djokovic beat Alcaraz for the men’s tennis gold in Paris (he was disappointed with the Serbian’s win). He said that he wanted to pay homage to Paris’s strong history and love of art with some of the connections he made during this stretch.
“I’m looking a lot to French artists and paintings housed in French museums and trying to built that layer into it,” he said. “They’ve done such a good job of hosting it and it had tons of great imagery that it’s a lot of fun and definitely a natural tie-in to the arts.”
If the French pole vaulter was the viral moment of the Olympics, he believed the surfer and his board above the wave would be the defining image of the Paris games. He paired the photo with The Castle of the Pyrenees, by René Magritte.
He walked me through the process:
“There's no painting out there that's literally a surfer with a surfboard hovering over the waves. You gotta get creative. It's not quite like a theme in art history. You often have Jesus walking on water, but this guy's hovering, so you probably want to get that separation. But then it's like, all right, what style could this be? It's fairly surreal. Magritte’s got a lot of paintings where things are hovering. Does he have blown water? He's hovering over water. And so, it's looking at the image and not knowing the exact piece that might fit immediately, and not quite knowing the theme in our history, but knowing, like, there's got to be something in in Magrittes catalog, that would work. And then, sure enough, there’s The Castle. And matching that with the surfer worked.”
Rader described another one of his favorite shots from the Games: rower Akoko Komlanvi, by Lindsey Wasson.
Why does he love it so much? Not only because it can be paired with so many different paintings, but because it captures the “everyday beauty of Sport.”
“The canvas/backdrop that Paris has so beautifully provided, and no shot weaves multiple threads together more than the one above,” he writes. (click there to see the several paintings he’s paired that photo with)
We Live in a Simulation
Aside from keeping himself sharp and entertaining his followers, LJ finds something larger in the connection he makes between art and sports. There’s an emotional aspect to it that’s almost supernatural.
“It does kind of open you up to the idea that we live in a simulation, like a scene,” he told me. “This scene played out 600 years ago in art and then now it’s playing out in a completely different form.”
“The visuals match, the energy matches… what does that mean? That person painting that picture, never in a million years could have realized what it could be used for 600 years later. There’s something beneath the surface there. It’s fun.”
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