The Milwaukee Art Museum and the Carnegie Museum of Art have agreed to a Super Bowl bet! Even better: The museums have put major works by major artists on the line. The bet continues an annual tradition begun last year when MAN instigated a wager between the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Both museums are offering up significant impressionist paintings: The Carnegie Museum of Art has wagered Pierre Renoir’s playful, fleshy Bathers with a Crab (cicra 1890-99, above) on a Pittsburgh Steelers victory. The Milwaukee Art Museum has put on the line Gustave Caillebotte’s serene Boating on the Yerres (1877, below). (Coincidentally, the Caillebotte was one of the paintings I suggested here. I completely whiffed on the Renoir.) Milwaukee is the nearest city to Green Bay (pop. 100,000), which does not have an art museum.

– Tyler Green, Modern Art Notes.

As a snobby New Yorker, it’s easy to mock a bet between art museums in Milwaukee and Pittsburgh. So let’s do exactly that:

Oh how sophisticated, an art bet! And two works of impressionism, no less! Man, this type of thing makes you really glad the Jets didn’t advance to the Super Bowl, because how could anything from the MoMA or the Met or the Whitney or the Guggenheim or the Frick have possibly matched up to the offerings from the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Carnegie Museum of Art? We are all philistines compared to the fine-art connoisseurs of Green Bay and Pittsburgh.

As for the paintings: No disrespect, but I find ’em both kinda boring. I feel that way about a lot 19th-century painting for that matter. If it was a Jets-Bucs Super Bowl and we could put up a Magritte against a Dali, that’d be a pretty exciting bet. Of course it would also mean the Jets were in the Super Bowl.

And furthermore, my father’s interpretation of this classic Jack Handy quote is not for wagering:

Hat tip to Tom Boorstein for the link.