Band of Outsiders, 1964

I’d like to see a basketball game in a room of ancient sculptures, with an audience of prisoners. Replicas will do for starters, perhaps thereafter: the real ones would sound an apocalyptic note, a ritual of expenditure, Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus. I saw a kid prancing through a museum somewhat recently, with the requisite reproach from Mom: here the Band storms the palace, taking their own sarcophagus by force while the Horatii look on helplessly, a tomb where they’ll never belong.