Here for the Phillies and Picasso

This week’s Meta Gala spotlights a growing intersection between the arts and athletics, suggesting cultural institutions can “win” by embracing the world of sports.

May 9, 2025
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Here for the Phillies and Picasso

This week’s Meta Gala spotlights a growing intersection between the arts and athletics, suggesting cultural institutions can “win” by embracing the world of sports.

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We've all probably heard the term "arts and humanities" more in the last month than we have in the last year. With the government cutting cultural institutions’ funding — implicitly and explicitly questioning their worth — this moment is critical for arts and humanities institutions to recast their story (and reassert their relevancy) as they aim to rope in a broader range of audiences. And one unexpected way to do that? By stepping onto the playing field.

Just this week, the Met Gala hosted a record number of professional athletes, including Lewis Hamilton and (almost) Lebron James, raising a record-breaking $31 million for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute. But beyond the iconic Met steps, the everyday art world is overly courting a sports-loving audience as well.

After the Philadelphia Eagles defeated the Kansas City Chiefs in the 2025 Super Bowl, the team celebrated their victory at the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the site of a lesser known but more charming sports bet. For the past two years, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City have commemorated their home teams’ Super Bowl appearances by entering into a friendly wager: this year, Kansas City loaned out an Édouard Manet painting, and last year, it claimed Philadelphia’s prized Thomas Eakins painting.

And, across the Atlantic, the city of Rome has responded to sports fan riots by launching a program offering free museum admission to visiting football fans during Europa League matches — betting that cultural engagement could help reduce unrest. Put simply, a fan with somewhere to go is a fan less likely to throw a trash can.

These inventive and intentional crossovers show that museums and cultural organizations have an opportunity to connect with sports-loving audiences in both unexpected and meaningful ways. With over two hundred million sports trips taken in America annually, sports enthusiasts represent an increasingly large slice of cities’ tourism economies — often staying longer than the big game and spending more when they do. And this means that the convergence of arts and athletics could be just the ticket to reestablishing the humanities in everyday life, drawing new energy, relevance, and attendance to culture’s most cherished spaces.

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