In the 102nd minute of his team’s epic World Cup match against soccer powerhouse Argentina, with viewers around the globe hanging on every moment, the Cape Verde fullback Sidny Lopes Cabral unloaded a shot that curled all the way into the back of the Argentine net and sprinted into the stands to find his girlfriend, Jayley da Cruz. The image of their embrace quickly went viral, which was when LJ Rader knew he had to get to work.
“Regardless of whether or not Cape Verde was going to win that match, that was the image that would summarize that game,” he said.
Rader is the person behind the wildly popular Art But Make It Sports social media accounts, where he uses photographs and screengrabs of pivotal or dynamic moments in sports and juxtaposes them against canonical paintings or statues. Earlier this year, Rader released a book that includes some of his best-known posts, such as a side-by-side contrast of a 1999 photograph of US Women’s National Team soccer star Brandi Chastain’s shirtless celebration and a 12th century sculpture of a kneeling female deity on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
He’s been working overtime during the FIFA World Cup as he gets tagged by social media users in hundreds of images from different matches and rushes off to find their perfect fine art pairings. Sometimes the associations come to him immediately, as when he saw a photograph of English midfielder Jude Bellingham score on a header, where he looked just like a Sibylle Bergemann photo of a statue of Friedrich Engels being lifted into place in East Berlin. “I had just been waiting for the day where a player went completely horizontal to use it,” Rader said.
