Hey everyone, this week I wanted to talk about a really informative article discussing the healing power of art. It reinforced the importance of art as not only a visual stimulant, but also as a healing force in hospitals.
Artnet’s website started out by delving into a discussion about what type of art is best suited to exist in hospitals. Some say that abstract pieces, like the one shown above, might be too confusing for patients and might create a sense of anxiety in not knowing the real meaning of the piece, “Scholars remain divided on which art is most beneficial—or detrimental—to patients. Some researchers dismiss abstract art as unsuitable for hospital use, due to “the perceived ambiguity of meaning in abstract art, which is maintained as being too open-ended for patients to interpret, as they are often experiencing states of unfamiliarity, vulnerability, stress, unpredictability, and uneasiness,” Artnet’s website started out by delving into a discussion about what type of art is best suited to exist in hospitals. Some say that abstract pieces, like the one shown above, might be too confusing for patients and might create a sense of anxiety in not knowing the real meaning of the piece”.
One thing that caught my interest was one artist’s project in the University of Texas at Austin’s medical school in which patients and healthcare providers were photographed and hung those photos in the building,”Hamilton photographed 530 people with connections to the university’s healthcare space—either patients or healthcare providers—through a frosty membrane, which brings the parts of their bodies touching the plastic into sharp focus, while everything else fades away. The results often approximate imagery with shallow depth of field, although they aren’t achieved through a camera setting. Standing in front of them, the works looked ethereal to me, as if portraying angelic versions of each person or like the sitters were in the process of teleporting to a new place in a Star Trek-style transporter.”
This was a really interesting read and if you want to read the full article the link to the article is https://news.artnet.com/art-world/how-hospitals-heal-with-art-1606699 .