I've got to say, both these posts make complete sense to me. :yes:
I think we can all agree that figure skating is not as hoity-toity as opera and ballet.
I think we can also agree that it is a little more hoity-toity than soccer and hockey. You pay your money and you take your choice.
About music in floor exercises for ladies gymnastics, that is an interesting comparison. As far as I can tell female gymnasts do not make any use of their music at all. They do a couple of cutsy-wootsy poses (
cutsy-wootsy is not to be confused with hoity-toity 
), then they get down to business and do their tumbling passes.
Is ladies figure skating in danger of becoming like that?
Mathman, I believe that you were born out of your time. There are occasions when your writing is like a strain of Rochefoucauld (its epigrammatic cast, and in pith and point) that has been merrily crossbred with the fables of Fontaine (in its illustrative quality).
My own attempt at a contribution to your ground-breaking concept of skating "hoity-toityness" (I'll call it "HT" for short): it seems to me that we often lose sight of the fact that the idea of figure skating as a deliberately aesthetic enterprise is actually still in its infancy, as artistic disciplines go, and perhaps a foundling at that. IMO, it wasn't until figures were eliminated that the notion of skating as an expressive vehicle was allowed true scope (and the reason that Janet Lynn is still worshipped today as one its martyrs, when many champions of and before her time are now little more than historical curiosities).
Further, when we consider the evolution of art forms for which there is documentation, it is often the case that they came from humble beginnings. It is now a truism that Jazz is the only authentically American art (and in its finest exponents, is now considered by many to be "high art" and hence HT/cerebral/esoteric/etc., the incontrovertible proof of which is the reflexive dislike in which it is held by the average teen
).
But this wasn't always the case. A music that started with the poor and the colored, to the use the term of the time, and probably with more rudimentary techniques, and enjoyed a phase in which it was the rock music for an earlier generation, has scaled to the higher rungs of the HT ladder. What's revealing, though, is that it took a century to achieve this, and will require yet more time to reach HT empyrean (although it will, I believe, eventually get there).
There are, I suggest, some real parallels with skating. Like jazz (and the British Empire), skating's artistry was perhaps 'acquired in a fit of absent mindedness' (when people watched Janet Lynn and started to wonder: "hmmm, I actually quite enjoyed that... why didn't she win?" Vox populi vox dei.).
IMHO, where skating sometimes goes wrong is in its nouveau insecurity. Like a Victorian lady's maid striving to acquire an instant patina of caste by aping the decolletage of her mistress, I often feel that skating is overly concerned with hewing to the conventions of older, more established artistic disciplines such as ballet. My gripe is not against borrowing as such (actually, the practice has always been rife in all the arts, including ballet), but rather against the conviction among some that wholesale adoption is
de rigueur and does not admit of choice in the matter.
As in the case of the aforementioned domestic (who, so I've been told, later got a job in a typing pool, demonstrated her intelligence and spunk, rose to CEO and started buying haute couture to her own taste), I predict that figure skating, having acquired a taste for artistry as an intentional project, will continue to evolve, gradually and organically developing its own set of conventions and, eventually, mature. In some ways, I think we are lucky to be able to watch skating in its period of change; artistic maturity has its own issues, including the real prospect of hieratic stagnation. So let's not be too hard on it for deficiencies in HT during its growing pains.
The potential spanner in the works is always the fooling around with the rules. Whether or not the current rules regime represents the ideal balance of sport and art, I'm of the mind that it nevertheless maintains enough space for at least the possibility of meaningful artistic performance. If, however, skating begins to swing too far to the technical (eg the school figures era) or too often, the evolution of skating aesthetics will be stunted, and may even suffer an extinction event.
Olympia said:
Math, I hope you were laughing as hard when you wrote this as I was when I read it. I immediately had a mental image of Philippe Candeloro in one of his more out-there pro skates.
Seriously, though, I wonder if we could make the case for skating carrying an extra emotional power because of the way the skater interacts with the music. Of course all sport can be incredibly emotional! But musical interpretation (if it's done right; not all skaters hit this mark, of course) adds an emotional level to the skating program that goes beyond just the excitement of seeing a phenomenal jumping pass. I must confess that a gymnastics floor exercise rarely does that for me, largely because as Mathman says the gymnasts don't really make use of the music. (Face it: we think skating programs are restrictive because of their requirements, but gymnastics programs are ten times more demanding. There's no way a gymnast could use a piece such as Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F for a floor exercise.)
I think you are absolutely right in your comments, Olympia. The emotional experience stemming from good art is different from the sporting experience, both in terms of the available range, and in the sense that the artistic experience is communicative: at its best, we feel the thrill of understanding the emotional message sent by the artist, like receiving a gift from a lover.
And I agree that gymnastics, rhythmic or otherwise, are in this sense what skating used to be like, and have only limited scope for, as you say, the artistic experience.
