Where You See Sports, He Sees Art

Meet the man behind the star social media account of the NBA playoffs: Art But Make It Sports.

Kathryn Riley/Getty Images (Butler); Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images (painting)

Down 11 in the first quarter of Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finals, Heat small forward Max Strus took a pass beyond the three-point line. He jetted past Marcus Smart on the perimeter, burst into the paint and leaped for a two-handed slam. But Strus had an Al Horford problem: Rushing to the restricted area, the Celtics' 15-year veteran center rose and swatted Strus’s attempt away. A replay showed Horford’s long right arm extending as he jumped and his hand meeting the ball to knock it from Strus’s grasp.

As he watched, LJ Rader’s mind snapped to The Cathedral⁠—Auguste Rodin’s 1908 sculpture depicting two intertwined right hands carved from stone. Based on how the arms are shaped, Rader knew that he might have a match. He had visited Mexico City’s ​​Museo Soumaya and had an image of the sculpture on his phone—he checked it, but it didn’t look quite like Horford’s block. Instead, Rader found a picture of The Cathedral on display at Paris’s Rodin Museum and pasted it side-by-side with a screenshot of the block. In less than 10 minutes, Rader sent the mashup out from his Twitter account, Art But Make It Sports, to 50,000-plus followers.

Try standing in the Met and opining on how Juan de Flandes’s rendition of Saint Francis is reminiscent of Michael Jordan’s legendary shrug. Crickets. Or, attempt turning to a fan in the stands and remarking how a player soaring for a reverse dunk brings to mind Giotto’s The Ascension. What? Art But Make It Sports does both, bridging the divide between hushed museum halls and raucous stadiums. Its oeuvre spans more than a thousand posts, juxtaposing athletic and artistic images. Rader launched the account in December 2019, but it has particularly taken off during the current NBA playoffs, with all of their emotion and melodrama. Since postseason play began in April, the Art But Make It Sports Twitter account has grown from around 16,500 followers to more than 51,700.

“People have reached out and said I didn’t have an appreciation of sports before,” says Rader, whose day job is as a director of product at Sportradar, a sports data company. “And vice versa, sports fans that reach out to say they want to talk about art through the account.”

Rader grew up in Westchester, N.Y., rooting for the Knicks, Yankees and Giants, and after graduating college went to work at NBC Sports and DraftKings before landing at Sportradar. But he always had an unfulfilled desire to study art history. “I remember telling my parents I was thinking of minoring in it,” says Rader, 32. “They laughed at me. [They said] you’re not going to do that, it’s not going to help you get a job. They were probably right.” His interest in art never subsided.

Before the pandemic, he traveled for work often and would spend an extra day or two in a city visiting its museums. As a self-described amateur appreciator of art, Rader amassed more than 5,000 pictures of artwork on his phone and has committed most to memory.

One day about seven years ago, inspiration struck him while he was staring at Ilya Repin’s portrait of Vsevolod Garshin at the Met. Rader posted the artwork to his personal Instagram depicting the melancholic Russian author with the caption “Knicks fan - 2000-Present.” He did it to make his friends laugh, and those types of posts are still his favorite. Rader gets a kick out of imagining what it would be like if the artists knew what he was doing with their work.

After enough encouragement, Rader made Art But Make It Sports its own dedicated account. Tired of low-effort sports memes, he wanted to create something more clever and more interesting. Now, when Rader sits down to watch a game, he can’t help but keep an eye out for a museum-worthy moment.

Inspiration tends to arise in two ways. The first is the easiest for Rader: He sees something in a game and immediately connects it to the piece of art that’s a perfect fit. When Warriors small forward Andrew Wiggins posterized Luka Dončić during Game 3 of the Western Conference finals, Rader knew he had to use Giambologna’s Samson Slaying a Philistine. The sculpture shows the biblical brute standing atop his foe, clutching his head in one hand and wielding an ass’s jawbone in the other, ready for divine retribution.

An apt portrayal of a vicious tomahawk slam.

“The photo I have is off-center,” says Rader. “I went and found a better version. If you look at it, I moved the image on the left to rotate it. I wanted to get this one out really quickly because I was watching the game as it happened. There’s a Warriors photographer who I’ve been talking to. After the game, he had a much better version that clearly shows Wiggins moving Luka’s head out of the way. I posted that to my Instagram story afterward.”

The more gratifying memes, for Rader, are hatched when he doesn’t have an exact image in his head, leading to a second, theme-based approach. He’ll know a common subject matter depicted in art⁠, like Greek mythology⁠, or an artist’s specific style, and scour open-source libraries until one fits. Hence how Jimmy Butler came to be compared with youth, grace and beauty personified.

“I knew I wanted to use the theme of the Three Graces,” Rader says. “I spent a decent amount of time looking because they’re depicted in paintings and sculptures. I landed on this one because there’s the obvious visual match.”

Art But Make It Sports reached critical mass by mid-May, with posts surpassing 28,000, 31,000 and 34,000 likes during the first two rounds of the NBA playoffs. Why now? Rader attributes the account’s recent surge in popularity to getting noticed by larger accounts and the fervency of NBA Twitter. He might explore adding Art But Make It Sports merch, but he has no plans to quit his day job. Rader spends about an hour per day maintaining the account and says he’s happy to keep it that way.

The trolls have stayed away, too. Only one person, Rader says, has tweeted that they hate the account (even if a few commenters said not to compare Devin Booker to Jesus). Otherwise, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Rader will continue to serve mashups through Art But Make It Sports⁠—all for the love of the game.

“The reason why I’m even still doing it is because of what people write in,” Rader says. “Some of the messages are wild. [They say] this is the account that’s keeping me on Twitter.”