Imagine visiting a famous gallery, In the first room, you find classical sculptures. In the second room, Impressionist paintings. In the third room, you find a tennis court.

Writers often liken tennis matches to works of art. This is especially true at Wimbledon, with its grass courts, uniformed umpires and players dressed in white. Journalists compare the players making elegant shots to painters, musicians, and poets.

Tennis matches also have a strong sense of narrative. They are divided into three or five sets, which resemble the acts in a play. Audiences at Wimbledon will often laugh, gasp, cry and break out in applause, just like people at the theatre.

The boundary between art and sport is difficult to define. Take rhythmic gymnastics, where dancers create beautiful displays, but with those judged to be the winners awarded medals. The same is true in figure skating, artistic swimming, and the new Olympic category of Breaking.¹

But even more well-known sports have creative elements. Football is called the beautiful game and boxing the noble art. Novels, essays and poems have been written about games such as cricket and baseball.

To most people, a work of art is an object like a sculpture or book created "to express serious meanings or ideas of beauty".² Matches are competitions, but there are no winners in poems and plays. As the writer Olivia Laing has argued, "competition has no place in art".³

However, games can bring people together and get them exercising outside, which is good for mental and physical health.⁴ When a team is doing well, sports can give an entire city or country something to hope for together.

Just ask the fans travelling to Germany for the Euros, to Paris for the Olympics, or to London for Wimbledon. They will see skill and beauty and feel emotion equal to that provoked by the greatest works of art.

Can sports be art?

Yes: Athletes are as skilful as artists. Games are as exciting as stories. Winning or losing has as much emotion as love or loss. There is no difference between sport and art.

No: There may be similarities between art and sport, but they are not the same. When we want to understand our lives, we turn to films and novels, songs and paintings.

Or... Sport is valuable whether or not it is a work of art. Games can give people a reason to exercise, while tournaments can give whole countries a reason to hope.