Jake Walerius

It has—I don’t mean to upset you, really, but at some point facts must be faced—it has become socially acceptable in recent years to claim that Zinedine Zidane is overrated. Of course (as his detractors glumly acknowledge) he produced several match-winning contributions on some of the sport’

3. Art—possibly unlike football, although this remains to be seen—is capable of expressing content, of making claims about the world. Thus, Guernica condemns the brutality of war, 1984 warns against the dangers of totalitarianism, 4’33” tells us something about the nature of sound and silence, etc. Whatever

1. Football, we are assured, occasionally these days with some exasperation, is political. The exasperation, I gather, is a product of the fact that a considerable number of people are inclined to respond to this assurance with indignation. Football is for such people an escape from the political, which (we

I begin with a brief (some would say overly simplified, others would say incorrect) history of the philosophy of art. Plato and Aristotle said that art was imitation, and for two thousand years no one really took issue with this definition. Then Marcel Duchamp put a urinal in an art