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Seattle & New England Museums Are Betting Paintings on the Super Bowl

Super Bowl XLIX has become battle for seascape paintings between the Seattle Art Museum and New England's Clark Art Institute.
Composite by Beckett Mufson, Images via, via, via, via.

Super Bowl Sunday: the second-most important American holiday (after Independence Day). It’s the one day of the year you have free reign to gulp down a deluge of nachos, wings, and finger-sized foods, chug a bushel of cheap beers, yell about deflated balls, and pretend to care about football a lot more than you actually do. Even the art world is getting in on the action —Seattle Art Museum and New England’s Clark Art Institute have gone so far as to wager two seascape paintings on the game's outcome.

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If the Seahawks take the crown, the Clark Art Institute will have to fork over Winslow Homer’s West Point, Prout’s Neck. Should the Patriots serve up a beat down, the Seattle museum will have to hand over Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast by Albert Bierstadt. “It’s an Atlantic Ocean seascape versus a Pacific Ocean seascape, so it made sense,” explains SAM’s director Kim Rorschach to Art News. Last year, when the Seahawks prevailed, the museum won custody of Denver Art Museum’s The Bronco Buster, a cowboy sculpture by Frederic Remington.

The works aren't for keeps—the exchange will last only three months—but we say, let the games begin.

Clark Art Institute's wager, West Point, Prout’s Neck (1900), Winslow Homer. Image via

Seattle Art Museum's bet, Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast (1870), Albert Bierstadt. Image via

H/t Art News

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