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Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

OPINIONSportsDecember 6, 2022

Why does New Zealand insist on pitching art against sport?

Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

Maybe the arts need more presence in mainstream media, but why does that automatically equate to less coverage of sport?

The headline on Stuff had a Groundhog Day-like element to it: “The arts need to get a slice of sport’s blanket media coverage”. It came close to a year after a similar headline – “Just like the Olympics, arts should be valued in the newsroom as well” – appeared on the same site.

“In lockdown I find myself, naturally, turning more to the media,” Mark Amery, the author of the 2021 piece wrote. “And from that to a subject that never ceases to fascinate me: the extensive radio, screen time and column inches devoted to sports, even when our grounds are closed.”

As it turned out, the place where I once worked closed its sports radio station and gutted its sports department with redundancies once the grounds closed, but that’s by the by because it’s not the lack of accuracy in the premise that’s most frustrating, but the flawed thinking at the core of it.

The arts doesn’t need a slice of sport’s “blanket media coverage” – a concept as alien to the vast majority of sports-not-called-rugby as it is to arts – but it does need its own coverage.

By pitting the lack of coverage of the arts as some sort of phony culture war with sports, you just perpetuate many of the stereotypes that annoy the hell of people like me who believe that somewhere between the trenches, there must be a place for people who enjoy both.

Just as irritating as the boofheads who dismiss the arts as “elitist crap” are the too-cool-for-schoolers who think using words like “sportsball” puts them on a higher plane of consciousness. You might judge the poor oinks who enjoy the odd 80 minutes of footy but, despite the declining popularity of the national sport, there’s still a hell of us out there.

It’s all a bit lame; a bit unseemly. When you’re complaining about the coverage of one interest group over another, what you’re really saying is: “Why is the thing I like not as popular as the thing you like?”

The debate over whether the arts gets sufficient attention should never be framed as an either/or proposition with sports. Perhaps in another age when newsprint space was hard won and fiercely protected there was a genuine need to push your agenda over that of another, but there’s a lot of room for everybody in the digital world.

We can be fighting on the same side, for the same thing. More, more, and more…

Pimping for coverage in mainstream media could even be considered a bit passé. There are better, more streamlined options. When I hit the “discover” button on my Substack dashboard, for example (an unsubtle yet shameless plug), “Culture” comes up as my third button, while “Sports” is ninth, right out there among the weeds of “Faith & Spirituality”. 

If there’s an audience waiting to be served by news and commentary from New Zealand’s art and culture world, however you might define that, it should not be difficult to fill it.

This piece started as a very short rant on my newsletter, which included lines like, “Why don’t arts advocates cavil against the amount of space given to business, or to opinion?” When I was asked to expand these thoughts, it dawned on me how many different threads there could be to the discussion if you were committed to an arts vs sports arm wrestle.

You could point out that in terms of venues, New Zealand’s arts and culture consumers are considerably better off than sports fans. There are a bunch of world-class galleries, libraries, museums and concert spaces whereas sport, despite commanding so much attention, makes do with infrastructure that is, with the possible exception of our boutique (and relatively inexpensive) test cricket grounds, dire.

It almost makes one angry enough to scribble out an op-ed with the headline: “The sports need to get a slice of the arts bricks and mortar.”

But what would be the point?

Nobody would benefit from begrudging the arts any of its nice things.


Keep going!