Can you see the similarity between this Travis Kelce catch and a famous painting?
Chances are, sports fans don’t know the name LJ Rader, but many likely know his wildly popular social-media account.
Rader is the man behind the Art But Make It Sports accounts on X and Instagram, and he posts photos from sporting events that look remarkably similar to famous pieces of art.
“I have a massive folder on my phone of photos that I’ve taken at museums and galleries around the world,” Rader told Town & Country magazine earlier this year. “I think it’s over 12,000 photos now. I have them mentally sorted and a decent amount of them memorized and aspects of them that I know about. So heading into any given day, or any single (sports event), that’s the memory bank that I know I’m going to pull from. It’s using knowledge of art history and artist styles. ...
“When I see the sports thing, I know the art thing and knowing the art thing is knowing it’s either this image or this artist or this genre, and then it’s deciding is this worth posting? Is it OK? Is it a good enough comparison to throw out there into the world and see what happens?”
Rader apparently watched the Chiefs’ 30-17 win over the Lions on “Sunday Night Football,” because he came up with a couple of great posts.
One was of Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, who landed on his head after making a catch. In Rader’s eyes, that was remarkably similar to Falling Man by the late German artist Max Beckmann. That piece is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
And this scene from the postgame brouhaha between the Lions and Chiefs was compared to a 1622 painting called The Dentist by Gerard van Honthorst. Don’t feel bad if you are unaware of that particular piece of art.
This story was originally published October 14, 2025 at 9:59 AM.
