Seattle Art Museum Director Trash Talks Indianapolis-New Orleans Super Bowl Wager

This year's Super Bowl winner will bring home the Lombardi trophy and a priceless work of art.

​Inter-city wagers are part of the chewy cud that keep football fans and the media occupied for the interminable two week wait between championship games and the Super Bowl. Usually these Super Bowl bets go no further than the cities mayors putting up some sort of regional delicacies.

In 2006, then-Mayor Greg Nickels offered his Pittsburgh counterpart Pike Place ale, Pagliacci pizza and dinner for two at the Space Needle. This year Indianapolis and New Orleans are wagering competing shrimp dishes. (Mmmm, mmm, mmm, love that...Indianapolis shrimp?)

But there's also a new wrinkle to the usual pre-game rivalry. As the heads of both the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art have decided now would be a good time to get into the greatest art director, Super Bowl-centered trash talk session you've ever seen. A ruckus Seattle's art community wants a part of.

SAM director Derrick Cartwright gargles with diesel fuel and flosses with piano wire.

​It started on Monday when Indianapolis head Max Anderson wagered a painting by Ingrid Calame. NOMA director E. John Bullard then upped the ante, betting a three-month loan of a Renoir. Apparently this wasn't good enough, as more trash talk ensued before Anderson and Bullard finally settled the terms of the bet: a Turner for a Claude Lorrain.

I don't know my Turner from my Lorrain anymore than you do. But while watching this pissy slap-fight, I thought I wonder what Seattle Art Museum would offer if the Seahawks were playing in the Super Bowl?

Thankfully, SAM head Derrick Cartwright was more than willing to go along with this silly little game. In fact, the Illsley Ball Nordstrom Director straight brought the fury. *snaps fingers*

Here's Cartwright:

"My son, Graham, is the biggest football fan in our family, but I have too much respect for Max Anderson and John Bullard to let them have all of the fun in the workup to Super Bowl Sunday.

This piece is called "Some/One." As in someone just got served.

​Next year, after Pete Carroll works his magic on the Seahawks, I can imagine SAM really raising the ante in the round of wagers between rival museums. SAM is a global art museum, and I'd like to move away from the strictly Euro-centric view that my colleagues in Indianapolis and New Orleans seem stuck in. (Editor's Note: Damnnnnnnnnnn.)

"There are few things more admired, or more precious, than SAM's 17th-century Japanese Crow Screen. It is currently in Japan as part of an exhibition of our masterpieces of Asian art, however. Would Seattle tolerate it leaving town again? Perhaps we could show off the more complex and eclectic nature of our contemporary art scene by putting up Some/One (2001) by Do-Ho Suh, a Korean-born artist now working in New York as the bet. It is not only a perfect demonstration of Seattle's Pacific Rim outlook, but also has fast become an icon of the new downtown SAM space. (Although, Roy McMakin's Love & Loss at the Olympic Sculpture Park has an appropriate title for this kind of museum bet, I think.)

Alternately, we could offer a treasured work from our rising American art collection. Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast (1870) by Albert Bierstadt is an image that shows off the natural paradise from which the Seahawks hail. The painting still succeeds at drawing crowds and would be a real winner."

I have no idea what any of that means. But I think it's safe to say Indy and Nawlins done just got tow up.