Both art and sport have the ability to exert cohesive influences. The main difference between the two being that
art seeks intellectual growth while
sport singles out physical superiority.
Artistic creation, be it literary, musical or cinematic, contributed to altering the course of last century through a selection of images and texts which inspired, or were inspired by major events of each decade.
Of most value to this argument would be to study the rise of the ‘Beat’ Culture through the fumes of marijuana and acid waves of 1950s to 70s ‘New America’. This counterculture has turned into one of the most influential movements of the century leaving in its wake seminally important works by such artists as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassidy, and later inspiring the phenomenal rise of such American director icons as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdonavich and Hal Ashby.
These men challenged the views of the industrial-machine civilisation. They fought for freedom from intellectual oppression, and turned the economy of faliure and success upside down with a pencil in one hand and a joint in the other. It would be wrong to call them a fraud because of their drug abuse, for what remains important is the fact that the ideas expressed in their work were clear. They worked for the good of everyone, striving for universal enlightenment and freedom of speech, not individual or team superiority.
That, however, is what Professional sporting events by definition are: competitions between two or more individuals, or teams. The aim of a sporting fixture is to determine who is the fastest, strongest, most agile, or to put it simply: to test the limits of human physical capacity. The interference of drugs nullifies all personal achievement, it diminishes the importance of training to achieve that ultimate physical form and the sport no longer tests the limit of the natural human body. However, more importantly, drugs give some athletes an unfair advantage over those who wish to compete knowing their own natural limits.
Sport has become more serious than ever, and this physical superiority of which I speak can only be achieved by hard work. It cannot be accepted if an unfair advantage is given, or taken in the form of drugs.
This is not the case with artistic expression. One cannot discredit the importance of an entire artistic generation for being ‘under the influence’, because unlike sport, for them art was, and still is, no competition, it is a language, a language which was absorbed by, and unified the mass and middle-class of their day.