Come next week I expect to bring some meatier critical fare to the table, but in the meantime I have paid writing obligations that can’t afford to get sidelined by playing referee to excessive blog histrionics.

So… how about that not-so-local sports team?

Even though my play-off picks leading up to tomorrow’s Superbowl were ridiculously bad this year, I’ll still be watching the game tomorrow night and can take vicarious interest in one of the more interesting side wagers pinned to the outcome. Thanks to some brilliant goading from MAN’s Tyler Green via Twitter (there we go, I finally conceded that Twitter might be good for something other than ego-wank), the Directors of the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art have wagered loans from their permanent collections on the success (or otherwise) of their home teams.

A read of Green’s updates on the bets is well worth the one-upmanship and smackdown between IMA director Max Anderson and E. John Bullard of NOMA - the highlight being Bullard’s refusal to put up Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun’s Portrait of Marie Antoinette on the grounds that the 1788 painting was “too fragile to travel, much like Favre.”

Instead, the Colts and the Saints will be playing not just for the big-ass trophy and fancy new rings, but the three-month loan of significant landscape paintings.

Should the New Orleans Saints prevail, NOMA will receive the loan of J.M.W. Turner’s The Fifth Plague of Egypt (1800), a massive and moody canvas characteristic of Turner’s atmospheric and dramatic handling of the landscape.

On the other hand, a victory for Indy means NOMA will loan their Claude Lorrain painting An Ideal View of Tivoli (1644) to IMA, which would prove a great companion to the Turner at either museum given Turner’s indebtedness to Lorrain for having essentially founded landscape painting as a genre during the Italian Baroque.

Supposedly, Anderson at IMA has already decided where to hang this beauty when it arrives from NOMA. Which is just as well because bad play-off bets or not, I did choose Indy to go All The Way, and still stand by that.

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