Declan Rexer, managing editor
Get your GOAT: I’ll admit, I’ve never been a big baseball fan (an inability to hit a Little League pitch and my family’s support of the at best middling White Sox served as powerful deterrents). But the sports fanatic in me can’t not talk about Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani’s Game 4 performance in the National League Championship Series earlier this week. I’m not here to give my thoughts on baseball’s failure to stop big-market teams from gobbling up all the talent or the schedule’s absurd length leading to both exhausted fans and injured players. I’m here instead to say that it’s time to give Ohtani his flowers.
The Ringer, a sports publication, went through each of the twenty greatest playoff games of all time as ranked by WPA/LI, an advanced statistic that measures a player’s individual contributions to the probability that his team wins the game. Ohtani’s raw score was the second highest on record, and this while meaningfully contributing both as a batter and a pitcher, something previously achieved by just three other players. Ohtani’s capacity for completely taking over games from both sides of the field is simply not something that’s ever been done. The NFL hasn’t had a two-way star since the 90s (Travis Hunter was a sensation simply for trying) and there isn’t a lot of overlap between the NBA’s elite scorers and defenders. In a sports market saturated with dominance, from Jokic’s monstrous triple-doubles to Mahomes’ seven straight AFC championship games, Ohtani might just be the greatest athlete alive.
Charlie Phelan, assistant editor
Unto Thee: On September 23, the Smart Museum unveiled “Unto Thee”, University of Chicago professor and acclaimed installation artist Theaster Gates’ first Chicago solo exhibition. According to the Smart Museum, “‘Unto Thee’ embodies the relationships Gates has fostered within the University of Chicago, local communities, the South Side and broader Chicago” in addition to emphasizing Gates’ “unassailable belief in the potential of art to connect with and transform communities.” Among other things, the exhibition contains part of the roof of Rockefeller Chapel, glass lantern slides from the ISAC, pews from Bond Chapel, and the entire library of Dr. Robert Bird, a U Chicago Professor in Cinema and Media Studies and Slavic Studies who passed away in the summer of 2020.
It would be disingenuous to call the show an exhibition. To some extent, it is a portrait of the university. But the piece blurs the line between artist and curator to the point that the show ends up being fundamentally a portrait of Gates himself. Gates both selected all the elements of the show, in line with his “keeper of objects” methodology, and exhibited original pieces depicting black stories and experience. Indeed, one gets the impression that the show is less about developing relationships than elucidating the ones which already exist. By only including components which Gates had created or received as a gift, Gates frames himself as simultaneously the subject of history as well as the historian.
Nora Holmes, contributing editor