Art is good for your health? Allow me a quick eyeroll | Emma Brockes
Some now suggest a monthly dose of art can boost wellbeing. But the last thing we need is another item on our to-do lists
As the long autumn subsides and we finally head into winter, so we hit that point in the calendar when two rival theories of seasonal survival play out: one, the permission-giving invitation to give up and power down, encapsulated by Scandinavian hygge and Katherine May’s 2020 blockbuster Wintering; and two, the exhortation to push through the discomfort and get out there. If the midterm results in the US give us a huge boost this week, still we have to keep going until spring.
The latest contribution to the get-up-and-out-there branch of motivational badgering comes in the form of a report by an arts charity suggesting that, as with exercise and being in nature, our baseline mood may be improved by exposing ourselves to art on a regular basis. According to Art Fund, a national body that promotes access to the arts, a person’s mental and physical wellbeing may be meaningfully affected by abiding by a handy acronym – RDA for recommended dose of art – and attaching it to what appears to be an entirely arbitrary prescription, namely 60 minutes of art ingestion a month. According to Daisy Fancourt, a professor of psychobiology and epidemiology at University College London who wrote the report’s foreword, do this and, “alongside having a balanced diet, regular exercise and spending time outdoors”, your health will thank you.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist