Sports is populous. It doesn’t take a special skill or talent to play sports. It only takes skill to excel at it professionally. Sports can be enjoyed at a level relative to your own ability. If you play against others of equal prowess you’ll have a fighting chance at winning. In art you are required from the start to have a unique talent for your medium. There’s also no clear element of winning or losing. These factors combine to form a situation where it’s not easy for the average person to enjoy the activity nor can they readily understand how one thing is better than another. The motion picture industry has created a score card for itself in the “weekly box office totals”. This concept is ingenious because it creates clear winners in a non-competitive medium. It spurs on that mob mentality and drives more sales. People will go see the box office “winner” because it must be good to have “beaten” the other movies.

Is this system destructive to the medium? Not really. Does it help? Maybe at the highest levels of production, but it doesn’t really make enough of a difference to impact the majority of projects.

It’s in this “sporting” mentality that we get camera meta-data aswell. In photography, something that is also inherently non-competitive, there’s been a revolting trend toward displaying the settings, lenses, makes and models of cameras used to take photos. This strange trend exists primarily among hobbiests and photojournalists. All of the art photographers and “old-schoolers” I know find this trend tasteless. Is it? I’m not sure. I definitely would never do it, but I can see the allure of a hobbyist community using this as part of a tutorial-driven culture. At the highest levels of the art your methods are sacred and you wouldn’t want to encourage the propagation of “your” style. This makes me recall the story of Burt Munro, the New Zealander who beat all the odds to capture several land speed records using his antiquated Indian motorcycle. Burt was ridiculed fairly harshly for running what people assumed to be an unprofessional machine, but when push came to shove he outperformed many of the heavy-weights of his time.

It all ties back together with the desire to “play”. Everyone wants to be in on something and sport can be enjoyed with a minimum of equipment and preparation and you can easily gauge who is better than their opponent. That is why it will ultimately never be surpassed by artistic outtings in the public eye.