A recent literature review by Fudickar, Knotzka, Nielsen, and Hathorn appeared quietly last year in a clinical medical journal Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift, which is open access and publishes work in German and English. You can read it for yourself here.
In “Evidence-based Art in the Hospital,” 30 original sources are gathered and summarized to yield suggestions for making art selections in patient rooms and in social areas, usefully drawing a distinction between these two types of spaces. This list of sources includes some of the fresh evidence that has been moving the field in new directions and broadening its scope of inquiry.
Practitioners in the field would benefit from reading through these sources as a sort of primer, as it is both comprehensive and definitive.
Plenty of the usual suspects turn up in the bunch, but new findings by Karnic (2014) and Neilsen (2017) in particular call into question some of the old assumptions and frameworks, most significantly by recognizing the potential value of abstraction in visual art. The article’s discussion impartially summarizes all these findings together, and remind us that the evidence-base is still weak, too weak to draw definitive conclusions.
The authors classify their evidence into three “endpoints”: art preference, effects on well-being and behavior, and effects on findings. (This last endpoint is about measurable clinical outcomes, like blood pressure, heart rate, and use of pain medicine.) They go on to offer explanations of common findings that patients prefer figurative art and nature views, and then dive into subjects not obviously apparent in the results of their literature review. They consider “Art in isolation,” which is certainly a significant question when considering art for patients who may have to spend significant time alone. (The problem of patient isolation became, briefly, a cause for public concern at the start of the COVID emergency.) Then they rehearse the citation of key sources to discuss “Biophilia in studies on non-hospitalized persons,” also outside the scope of their results. Without greater familiarity with the protocols of scientific publication, specifically regarding a literature review, I can’t say how the authors justify these departures, but they do help to make the article, again, a useful sort of introduction to practitioners to get a basic grasp on the state of the field.
Finally, they focus briefly on “Abstract art in hospitals,” noting that some studies have found it to be useful and venturing that the history of inquiry into the subject has been biased by the “comparably large number of studies” focused instead on nature views and figurative art.
I have another theory about this bias, which I will explore elsewhere.
For now, I am just happy to note that the authors here have set aside (in that it does not appear in this article) that specious argument, and the findings used to support it, that art professionals have no business using their judgement, skills, or ability in selecting visual art for healthcare spaces, just because people who study art or work in the field happen to react differently to works of art than other people do. The argument commonly frames art professionals as out-of-touch, eager to show off their expertise, to select works of art that are “good for” the viewer based on the perceived value of their formal or art historical qualities.
My own wish to empower and enable arts professionals to turn their judgment, skills, and abilities to selecting and exploring visual art that can heal people.