In the last two years I passionately divided my spare time between two hobbies - Fine Art Photography and Bread Baking. Whenever a new fine art image was completed, I shared it with my Facebook friends and followers. It was only natural that I also made a Food Photography style image of any new type of bread I baked and shared them in my Facebook as well. Sometimes I also shared my images of pastry masterpieces baked by my wife.
Recently I posted within a week timeframe my latest fine art image
and an image of Lucy's latest masterpiece
The response to them (Likes/Comments) really surprised and intrigued me - the fine art one got 3/0 responses and the cake image got 25/7 responses, i.e. the cake got 8-1 win over the art. It looked like a perfect illustration of a far-famed Russian saying - 'In a battle between a television and a refrigerator, the fridge will always beat out the TV'. I guess this view is kind of specific to Russian mentality. I have not seen a matching saying in English, the closest one is, probably, the famous ‘It’s the economy stupid’.
My first emotional explanation of this skewed outcome was that maybe because the majority of my online audience has the Russian origin and experienced periods of food shortages in their past, it made them more gastronomically inclined in their image preferences.
However, my scientific background did not allow me to accept such sad truth easily. What if this outcome was just a random deviation? Luckily, I posted enough images of both categories to make a proper statistical analysis rather than to accepting this outcome as the final truth. There were 16 bread/pastry images and 9 fine art ones in total posted from May 2020 to August 2022.
The mean values of number of responses were 15 and 13 respectively. The statistical comparison of the means of two groups showed that the difference between means of Bread and Fine Art groups is not statistically significant. In plain English, it means that my audience has not expressed preference for one group over another.
Phew, I feel much better now!
For those interested in the details of the analysis - they are given below