art/sport, oil/water

“Though lumped together by Government in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, art and sport make very uneasy bedfellows. Maybe politicians think of them both as the leisure industries for people who didn’t want a proper job. But sport operates on the whole in a strictly controlled artificial arena with clear rules, and performance can usually be judged by empirical means, whereas in the arts we are encouraged to break the rules, intuition is the referee and no infrared beam will measure its worth, though I think some politicians wish it could be so.”