As the clock ticked down during last Sunday’s Super Bowl matchup between the Indianapolis Colts and New Orleans Saints, the Big Easy geared up for one of the most memorable celebrations in its long history of bacchanalia.

When Saints cornerback Tracy Porter intercepted a pass from the Colts’ Peyton Manning and ran it back for a 74-yard touchdown to seal a Saints victory, cheers went up from the French Quarter to the Ninth Ward. Bourbon Street flooded with revelers clad in Drew Brees and Reggie Bush jerseys, weighed down by tangled necklaces of black and gold Mardi Gras beads. In a bizarre but somehow reassuring tableau, grandmothers and toddlers alike danced in the streets to the Ying Yang Twins’ “Halftime (Stand Up & Get Crunk),” an incitement to drunken revelry that has become the team’s unofficial theme song.

At that moment, fine art was pretty low on the priority list of most members of “Who Dat Nation” –as the Saints faithful have dubbed themselves –floating somewhere below the euphoria of long-awaited Super Bowl glory, the source of their next oversized beer or daiquiri and where they may have left their clothes.

But thanks to the efforts of one art blogger and two forward-thinking museum directors in New Orleans and Indianapolis, the wide gulf between audiences of visual art and sports got at least a few millimeters narrower this year.

In a bit of museum smack-talk that played out on Twitter in late January and early February, the directors of the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Indianapolis Museum of Art got in on the Super Bowl fever that had infected their respective cities. At the suggestion of Tyler Green, who writes the blog Modern Art Notes on artsjournal.com, both directors agreed to bet a three-month loan of an important work from their collections to the institution in the winning city.

“Let’s get serious,” the New Orleans Museum of Art Director E. John Bullard wrote in an e-mail quoted on Green’s blog. “Each museum needs to offer an art work that they would really miss for three months. What would you like, Max [Anderson, of the Indianapolis Museum of Art]? A Monet, a Cassatt, a Picasso, a Miro? Sorry, but we have no farm scenes or portraits of football players to send you.”

Oh, no he didn’t!

As a result of the bet, and the Saints’ upset victory over the Colts, New Orleans will soon become the temporary home of J. M. W. Turner’s “The Fifth Plague of Egypt,” painted in 1800. It had wagered its own “Ideal View of Tivoli,” a 1644 painting by Claude Lorrain, in the case of a Colts win.

The bet, which is as much a testament to the power of Twitter as it is to the moxie of the participating museums, seems to be part of an increasing willingness to try creative approaches to building audiences in the museum world.

“There’s increasing realization that museums can find clever ways of engaging with their audience without diluting the quality of their programs, their collections and all that,” Green said. “One of the things I liked about the bet is that it was engaged with those two football teams, but it was absolutely about the art.”

Green said he hoped the collegial spirit of the bet would rub off on other museums.

“If it gets other museum directors realizing that they can do these kinds of things and not be seen as carnival barkers,” Green said, “then maybe they can loosen the reins on their staffs a little bit.”

Buffalo’s museums are no stranger to the idea of engaging directly with the community through sports, clearly Western New York’s biggest obsession. The Albright-Knox Art Gallery has often hosted a visit from the Stanley Cup, which it has paired with exhibitions of work by David Levinthal and others. And the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society just saw a nearly 40 percent attendance spike, thanks in large part to its exhibition on the Buffalo Bills’ 50th anniversary, which closed on Super Bowl Sunday.

Historical Society Director Cynthia Conides said the exhibit was an effective, creative way of drawing new audiences into the museum.

“We thought a Bills exhibit was absolutely appropriate for our community. The community gives very clear messages, and the devotion to sports was very clear,” Conides said. “People came to see the exhibit, but they discovered other things about our museum. They did stay.”

The Super Bowl bet will no doubt be dismissed in some high-falutin’ art world circles and by our stodgier critics as a populist gimmick with little to no potential effect on museum audiences. On the other side of the coin, it’s likely to be viewed by some non-art fans as disingenuous slumming by museums that could hardly seem more stuffy or disconnected.

It’s neither. The bet ingratiates museums in a small and clever way to a host of new potential museumgoers and does so with integrity and respect for the artworks at hand.

It speaks volumes about the simple ways in which art museums and other cultural institutions with reputations for inaccessibility can insert themselves into the conversations that matter in the cities they call home.