—Why It’s Time to Add Willow and Leather to the Pantheon of the Arts
There are four fine arts. Yes—four. Not three. Not seven. The traditional trifecta—painting, sculpture, and more recently, mixed media—have long held dominion over the hallowed halls of aesthetic seriousness. But it’s time we corrected the oversight.
The fourth fine art is cricket.
Before you scoff and spill your flat white over a discarded Frieze magazine in the Lord’s pavilion, let us ask: what is fine art, if not a cultivated, rule-bound arena in which the human spirit expresses itself through discipline, style, gesture, and ritual? And what is cricket, if not precisely that?
Cricket as Composition
The act of watching cricket is like observing a slow, deliberate painting in motion. The pitch is a canvas. The players, strokes. The ball—an instrument of line, arc, and punctuation.
Every forward defence by a test opener is a minimalist sculpture of concentration. Every cover drive is a brushstroke—exquisite, precise, never hurried. And the spinner? He is a conceptual artist in whites, laboring in metaphor and subtle irony. Shane Warne’s “Ball of the Century” might as well have been performance art. It defied logic, narrative, and gravity.
You don’t merely play cricket. You compose it.
Of Form and Formlessness
Like the greatest works of fine art, cricket is as much about what is not there as what is. The pauses, the silences between overs, the long stillness before the storm of a yorker—this is negative space, the silence between notes in a Miles Davis solo, the blank in a Rauschenberg.
It’s an art form that accepts duration—a five-day match that can end in a draw is nothing short of a time-based installation. No result. No climax. Just form, erosion, and a slow accumulation of meaning. Sound familiar, conceptual art fans?
Clothing, Code, Choreography
The aesthetics of cricket are impeccable. The costumes—whites for purity, Test caps with heritage, IPL kits as pop art. The rituals—tea breaks, sledging as unsanctioned dialogue, and the strange ballet of field adjustments choreographed by captains with painterly intent.
Cricket also contains a semiotic system as rich as any postmodern sculpture garden: leg slips, silly points, and a deep backward square leg sound like lines from an Ezra Pound poem. It is language made spatial.
A Living Installation
Modern art tried to break free of the gallery. Cricket had already done it.
A cricket match unfolds in space and time, under sun and floodlight, interrupted by rain, wind, political tension, and the odd stray dog on the outfield. It is alive, unpredictable, and deeply human. The cricket field is the largest and most dynamic gallery in the world. And like art, cricket does not rush. It demands your attention. It earns your awe.
Objections from the Critics
“But cricket is a sport, not an art,” comes the predictable cry from the ill-informed. But we have long admitted disciplines into the art world that demand physical prowess and rules: dance, opera, even architecture. If Jeff Koons can use industrial manufacture and still be art, why not Jasprit Bumrah’s biomechanical poetry?
If Marina Abramović can stand still in a room for hours and be lauded, why should a Harry Brooks innings not receive a similar reaction?
Let Us Redefine
So let us correct the canon:
• Painting – the play of pigment.
• Sculpture – the shaping of matter.
• Mixed Media – the synthesis of the sensory.
• Cricket – the choreography of fate and finesse.
We should not merely ask is cricket a fine art?—we should insist that it is one. Not metaphorically. Not tongue-in-cheek. But as a serious, rigorous, transcendent aesthetic practice.
To bowl a ball with intent is no less a gesture than to cast bronze.
To face it with courage is no less than to face the void of a blank canvas.
Cricket is art. Let us honour it as such.