How the Art But Make It Sports Creator Prepares for the Super Bowl
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In the eyes of LJ Rader, the creator behind Art But Make It Sports, basketball players Victor Wembanyama and Draymond Green become “Study for Jacob Wrestling with the Angel” by Marc Chagall. Sydney McLaughlin after winning gold evokes “Woman before the Rising Sun” by Caspar David Friedrich, whereas Caitlin Clark is channeling “The Garden of Earthly Delights” by Hieronymus Bosch. Jason Kelce in a beret is a dead ringer for “Self-Portrait with a Beret” by Claude Monet, and a scene from a hockey match is paired with “August, Rue Daguerre” by Joan Mitchell.
The premise of Rader’s now-viral Art But Make It Sports is relatively straightforward—he takes an image he sees in a sports game, and puts it side-by-side with a piece of artwork—but since its launch in 2019, he’s garnered nearly a million followers across X, Instagram, and Substack.
A sports fan since he was a kid, Rader was born in Japan but grew up in Westchester, New York. He recalls his dad letting him stay up for the 1996 Yankees World Series, and is a “long-suffering” supporter of the Knicks. (“They drive most normal people away from the world of sports.”) He also cheers on the New York Liberty and the Giants, and enjoys watching as much women’s soccer and college football as he can.
“I'm a sports junkie in all aspects,” he tells T&C over Zoom in late January. “So everything from the watching of sports to understanding businesses of sports, to the statistics side.” Art But Make It Sports is still a side-hustle for him, and will likely remain one. He works in the industry, and keeps tab on a wide range of sports. His followers, he says, “appreciate is that I don't just cover one specific thing. As long as a moment goes viral, it doesn't matter what sport it necessarily comes from. As long as an image is compelling, sports are sports.”
If you’re scrolling Instagram today, there’s a good chance you’ll see one of Rader’s famed side-by-sides of the Super Bowl. Here, he speaks with T&C all about what goes into his process—it involves an iPhone album with over 10,000 images—and his response to the assumption his work is AI-generated.
What inspired you to create the account?
I've always been a sports fan and I work in sports, so that side's always been ingrained in me. I've also always been an art lover. Right around the time that Instagram was starting up, I wasn't really the biggest fan of taking photos of myself or posting as an influencer might. I thought it'd be funny if I started to take photos at museums of artwork and then give them sports related captions. I often see things with sports lens; over time, friends that were like, you should make this its own thing. So at the very end of 2019, I just spun out a separate little account, with my family, friends, my mom's friends following—like a hundred people, max, for a decent chunk of time. Then eventually, Sarah Spain, sports writer, media personality, posted about it and that jumped the account to a thousand followers. Over time, it hit these various milestones and people posting about it.
For the Super Bowl, walk me through how do you prepare. What is your lead up process?
There's a 365-day theoretical grind of creating posts: It's fun, but it's: something happens, you post about it; something happens, post about it. And the things that become exciting are when you're posting about moments. Ultimately moments are made when more and more eyeballs are engaged on the thing that you're doing. The Super Bowl obviously takes it to another level where it's not just sports fans, but you're sort of part of the cultural fabric of what's going on.
So making sure you're weaving in not just what's going on in the game, but also the halftime show is huge and what's going on in the pre-game and commercials and stuff. In past years, I've just been at home just kind of tuning in hours beforehand. If I didn't have the account, I'd still be watching, doing the same thing. I’m trying to maintain a high editorial bar, while realizing I'll probably put out 10 or so posts within that 24 hour time span around Super Bowl.
Do you have a catalog of art that you're thinking about using, or do you see something and then it sparks an idea?
Somebody asked why is the account called ‘art but make it sports,' saying it should be ‘sports but make it art,' right? You're taking sports images and you're turning them into art—that's the part people see. But my process starts with the artwork. So it's mentally banking the art, having that on hand, ready when I see the sports image. But I'm really pulling from the art side and then making that into the sports.
With the Super Bowl, I'm tuned in, everybody's tuned in. I'm not going to miss anything worthy of turning into a post, but I don't go out of my way to say, ‘I think this artwork might come up.’ It's just naturally happens.
But my process is I have a massive folder on my phone of photos that I've taken at museums and galleries around the world. I think it's over 12,000 photos now. I have them mentally sorted and a decent amount of them memorized and aspects of them that I know about. So heading into any given day, or any single [sports event], that's the memory bank that I know I'm going to pull from. It's using knowledge of art history and artist styles; if I see something and I don't quite know the exact image, it's like, oh, that looks like it could be a Gerhard Richter [painting] and okay, if it's not a Richter, if it's less blurry and it's more still colorful, but more the lines are a Joan Mitchell…
When I see the sports thing, I know the art thing and knowing the art thing is knowing it’s either this image or this artist or this genre, and then it's deciding is this worth posting? Is it okay? Is it a good enough comparison to throw out there into the world and see what happens? Which previously it didn't really matter. I've always had a high editorial bar, but now, I don't want to post something and people be like, this is stupid, or why'd you do this? You have to be a little bit more careful now that there's a wider audience which helps sort of sharpen the content. So that’s all a long way of saying I don't really prep.
Did did you study art history? Where does your wealth of art knowledge come from?
No, I took a class in college—art history 101. I will never claim to be an art historian. I’m much more on understanding the visual side of things and that's where my mental rolodex is built off of. I used to travel a lot for work, and would always sneak in an extra day and go to the museum in whatever city I was in, as just a fun way to experience wherever you're visiting. Then I photograph art at museums—part of the process is studying through that folder after I come home and getting a sense of what I actually took pictures of.
As a New Yorker, what are some of your favorite museums in the city?
The classics, like the Met, the MoMA, the Whitney, the Jewish Museum. The Guggenheim is very hit or miss because it's just extremely exhibition dependent. You're not going there for their permanent collection, it's whatever artists are in the show they're featuring. The Morgan Library is super underrated, I love going there. And then the best-kept secret is the auction houses, which are free to go to, never busy, and have insane art oftentimes segmented by whatever that show is. So if you're not into contemporary art, don't go to the contemporary show, but they're constantly changing over and then you get to see artwork that potentially nobody else has ever seen before because it's been sitting in a private collection. Sotheby’s, Christie’s, are by far my favorite to go and hit up.
One one of my favorite posts you did recently was Naomi Osaka at Australian Open with a Katsushika Hokusai painting. Are you thinking about those cultural references often?
I've had the account now for five years; part of the reason why I keep running it is it's fun. It keeps me sharp, which is always funny when people are, on a daily basis, accusing me of using AI and [saying], ‘This isn't actually you, you're using a computer.' That makes me laugh— what would be the point of running this thing if it was just not my work as a human? I'm doing this because I enjoy it.
Now it's become a thing where it's like, I'm showing the human side of what can be creative, but that's a whole other thread to pull on. I've had this account for five years, and the goal is to keep it fun. And part of keeping it fun is keeping it challenging—and part of keeping it challenging is how do you build in additional layers into what kind of content you're putting out there. So it's not just, okay, this thing looks like this thing. If you can build in this artist is Japanese or this is from the National Gallery of Art in DC and it's Jayden Daniels who's the quarterback of the [Washington] Commanders, [can the] title match…what are the different layers that you can stack into a comparison? That's always at the forefront of what I'm trying to do. Sometimes it ends up just being okay, this thing just looks exactly like this thing, throw it out there. But that's what kind of keeps it fun if you can make those references.
How does it make you feel when someone accuses the account of being AI?
I guess I'm flattered in the sense of, to me, it's clearly human driven. To people that follow the account, it is clearly human driven, but if it drops on your timeline and you don't know what you're looking at, you're like, oh, maybe a computer made that comparison. Even though at the end of the day, if you know about what's going on, okay, there are layers built in here, the computers can't actually do this thing.
There was a tweet that went viral a few months ago that somebody was like, ‘I want AI to do my chores and do my laundry for me so that I have more time to create art. I don't want AI to create my art so that I have more time to do my chores.’
AI is a tool, I think it's extremely important. For example, I'll use Google Lens to identify the names of paintings that I photograph at museums. I have my folder of all these photos of paintings, but this way I don't have to take a photo of the name plate at the medium. So it saves my space on my phone, it saves me time when I'm in the museum, and it isn't part of the artwork; it's not part of the creative process. It's simply a tool. When I've got that photo and I'm going to use it, I click that button, it pulls up the information about the painting and the artist's name, the date, the title, and then I can include that.
Whereas if there was technology to use to match a sports image, and I'm going to apply an algorithm to match it, then that's creating the art itself or that's what a human should be doing. So in the sense of AI tools that aid people in their creative process I think that’s super important. But as soon as it steps over the line of creating the art itself, I think it becomes pretty dangerous. Part of what's unsettling is just it's pretty unwieldy at the moment where there's not regulations. What is truth, anymore, when you are scrolling through social media—whether it be artwork or what people are saying.
The folks that are driving the AI technology [are] cartoonish villains, they have a stake in breaking down what truth means and sort of seeing AI potentially take things over. So it's definitely scary. If you were to poll a hundred normal Americans, the majority of them would be like, ‘Hey, we should think about this first.' So yeah, not great.
What has it been like for you to see athletes and museums sharing your content?
The most fun part for me is the sports photography community. I'm a big fan of sports photography; I enjoy looking at sports photos and understanding that attribution is important, especially when we talk about the rise of AI and creatives being pushed aside for things that nobody's actually asking for. So making sure that each photographer, if I'm using an actual photo, gets credited and not posting until I have that, even though there's no guideline that says you have to do this. I'm celebrating artwork, and sports photography in and of itself is artwork.
If I'm going to find the name of the artist and the title of the piece that is a piece of artwork and that photo is a piece of artwork, so you got to make sure it sort of gets to the creator, gets highlighted, and now it's become popular in the sports photography community, which is a lot of fun to see. I've had a chance to meet a bunch of my heroes in the sports photography world and get to talk to them about their process. So I'd say that's the most exciting and enriching part of this. Museums are fun and the athletes are fun, but definitely the photographers are part of the reason why I keep it up.
Lead image from Rader’s December 25 post featuring a photograph of Travis Kelce by Joe Sargent/Getty Images and “Saint Nicholas Providing Dowries,” by Bicci di Lorenzo, 1433–35, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection.
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