This is the blog of the Arts Reviewing and Reporting Class Spring 2018 at the University of San Francisco. As Oscar Wilde wrote, “To the critic, the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own.”
English: President Barack Obama holds 3-D glasses while watching the Super Bowl game at a Super Bowl Party in the family theater of the White House. Guests included family, friends, staff members and bipartisan members of Congress. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The reason the Super Bowl is so much more valuable now, then, isn't that its ratings growth has been so explosive. It's that it's the only event that reliably delivers such a big audience.
English: Line graph of cost of 30 second advertising spot during Super Bowl US television broadcast. Data taken from Wikipedia articles (if more than one price is given, lower has been set). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I went to Super Bowl City, and now you don’t need to. There’s nothing there.
Welcome to NFL City
Nothing, that is, unless you like to pay $8 for a Bud Light and $20 for a small lobster roll. Or you want to see a lot, lot, lot of police officers, many in full military gear with assault rifles. Or line up to have your picture taken with a headless statue of a quarterback. Or line up even longer for a zip line that runs about 30 feet over a fake Golden Gate Bridge in the enormous CBS Sports complex.
That’s about it. Seriously. For a tourist attraction sponsored by a $10 billion operation, it’s really, really lame. It has no relationship to San Francisco at all; it’s entirely a corporate theme park that would be much more at home in some Mall of America than at the foot of Market Street in one of the world’s great cities.
