Health Care Fine Art

Crystal Bridges - A Major New Museum

View from the Southwest

A totally new major museum is big news! The new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is big enough to make Time Magazines list of the "Biggest Art Stories of the Year". However, the author seems preoccupied with the vast wealth that Alice Walton (the Wal-Mart heiress) must spend to buy the art.

I have this picture in my mind of the Wal-Mart heiressin one of those starkly lit war rooms like the one in Dr. Strangelove, with a big map on one wall that shows every institution in the U.S. that might be in any way interested in selling off some of its art.

How else would you go about filling a 100,000 sq. feet of gallery space with fine art if you you were not willing to spend vast sums of money?

The Museum is being built in Bentonville, Arkansas and is scheduled to open in 2010. It will be dedicated to American art and artists. The museum takes its name from a spring on the museum’s wooded site. The glass-and-wood building was designed by Moshe Safdie.

The museum-to-be already has a full featured website and even a blog.

The Art of Dublin Methodist Hospital

Five Canvas prints of Foxtail_14769 in Dublin Methodist's Cafeteria

The exciting new Dublin Methodist Hospital takes art very seriously. That is the topic of the Art Corner in the December issue of HealthCare Design Magazine. My copy arrived today and as soon as I got it I flipped to page 62 to see the article called "No longer an afterthought: The emerging importance of Art."

Being picked to provide art for the entire hospital was a great honor. Working with the "dream team" that Cheryl Herbert assembled was thrilling. The full text of the article is below, to read it ,click "Continue reading"...

The image above is a CGI rendering courtesy of Karlsberger

Best Music for HealthCare

What is the best music to use in a HealthCare?

From my limited experience, it would seem that Muzak, a kind of easy-listening background music is the most widely used. We even had it in the medical office that I used to work at. But just because it is widely used does not mean it would be the people's choice or that it would be the most effective at healing.

For visual arts, the most popular and effective turns out to be nature images. Komar and Melamid have conducted surveys around the world that statistically prove that nature images are the people's choice. For visual art, the most popular is also the most effective at healing. Would that be true of music?

Komar and Melamid have now finished surveys on what the people's choice is for music. You can hear samples of what they have found by clicking here. But, is the most popular music the most effective at healing? If anyone knows of quality research on healing music, please email me.

I came across the information on Komar and Melamid's Sound Survey on another Blog: DesignObserver by Michael Bierut.

Music in healthcare is also covered in a previous post: Classical Music is Bad

The music link that I provided is from Ubuweb (www.ubu.com). It is a completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts.

Featured Artist: Noppadol Paothong

Noppadol Paothong is passionate about wildlife; and he is a talented artist; and he is persistent about getting the perfect shot. He is willing to wait around while everyone else has given up and gone home. Passion, talent and persistence help explain why he is such a fine wildlife photographer.

If you want images of wild animals from North America for your hospital or clinic, I suggest starting with his photographs. 

He is a staff photographer for the Missouri Department of Conservation. I mentioned him last May in this blog because he was the one that spotted the Great Horned Owl Chicks on our property: Baby Owls!

Last week he was featured in the Joplin Globe. Click here to read the profile.

He is from Thailand and many Americans find his name hard to pronoucne. Try "NAWP-a-dawl POW-tong" Many of his fiends call him Nop.

To see more of the wonderful wildlife images of go to his website: www.nopnatureimages.com

Healthcare Spaces No.3

One of the gifts for me under the Christmas Tree this year was the book: Healthcare Spaces No.3 by Roger Yee

A key part of HealthCare Design is it's appearance. To really understand what is happening I want pictures; lots of high quality full-color photographs. That's what this coffee-table book is all about. I have Yee's "HealthCare Spaces No.2", so I knew what to expect in this book. I'm not disappointed. These are high-end, high-dollar projects; something to dream of.

The book is organized alphabetically according to 40 design firms; ranging from Anderson Mikos Architects Ltd. to Wilmot/Sanz Inc. Each project has a a few short paragraphs and 4 to 7 high-quality pictures, one usually full-page. Most of the pictures were professionally photographed but many were computer generated  (CGI). They were so well done that sometimes it was hard to tell if the image was real or CGI!

Even though the book does not focus specifically on Art in HealthCare many of the pictures show installed art. The art you can see ranges from prints to paintings, sculptures, murals and mobiles. Many of the projects showed the use of plants inside and out.

Yee, a prolific author, graduated from the Yale School of Architecture. He has 23 books currently listed on Amazon, including HealthCare Spaces No. 4 due out in February of 2008.

One mildly annoying thing about this $60 book (only $37.80 on Amazon.com) is that it has a few advertisements; like a magazine. Also, I wish that the book had a more global perspective; all of the 150 projects covered are from the United States.

Fashionably Obtuse Language

Roberta Smith does a great job covering the Arts for the New York Times. This week she had an article where she complained about the pretentious use of language by the art word.

When it comes to fashionably obtuse language, the art world is one of the leading offenders. Academic pretensions flash through like brush fire, without a drop of cold water splashed their way... Some may think such two-bit words reflect important shifts in thought about art, but they usually just betray an intellectual insecurity.

I agree! Why not use plain language instead of Gobbledygook? The pretentious use of language in Art Magazines and Art Books has bothered me for years. Sometimes I wonder if I'm not reading a philosophical or political treatise rather than an article about contemporary art. To see what I mean, pick up any copy of Art in America or even worse, Art Forum.

To have some fun generating your own Gobbledygook, check out this link.

Fire in the Fireplace

Hickory logs burning in our Fireplace

We had another two-inches of snow last night.
I'm curled up on the couch reading and watching the fire.
Christmas music is playing in the background.
Yesterday we went out can cut a small Eastern Red Cedar (very aromatic) in one of our fields and it is now decorated as our Christmas Tree. Tomorrow the family will all be here for Christmas dinner. I'm checking out for a few days.

Merry Christmas!

Therapeutic Landscapes Database

Irises by Van Gogh, 1889, Oil on Canvas, J. Paul Getty Museum

Therapeutic Landscapes are an important part of the healing environment. To learn about the this rapidly growing field we are lucky that there is a high-quality free online source: the Therapeutic Landscapes Database.

When it won the Communications Award of Merit of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 2004, Naomi Sachs, ASLA wrote:

This database is a web site that provides information to the public about restorative landscapes, therapeutic gardens, healing gardens, wellness gardens, and other topics related to research-based healthcare design. Available free of charge to anyone with access to the Internet, this web site is a valuable resource for people from many different backgrounds and disciplines, including landscape architects and designers, architects, healthcare professionals, students, and home gardeners.

You can access the Therapeutic Landscapes Database by simply going to their website at: www.healinglandscapes.org

Another way to learn about Therapeutic Landscapes is through books. On October 4th this year I reviewed the book "Healing Gardens". Click here to read the review.

Vincent Van Gogh painted his famous "Iris" painting (above) when he was a patient at the Asylum of Saint Paul de Mausole, in Saint-Remy, France. Van Gogh wrote: "For one's health it is necessary to work in the garden and see the flowers growing."

Color of the year for 2008

Blue Flag_5606

"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." Niels Bohr (1885 - 1962)

Just because prediction is difficult does not stop people from trying; especially at this time of year. Pantone has just selected Blue Iris (18-3943) to predict the "color direction" for 2008.

Beatrice Eiseman, the executive director of the Pantone explained:
“Blue Iris brings together the dependable aspects of blue, underscored by a strong, soul-searching purple cast. Emotionally, it is anchoring and meditative with a touch of magic.”

Cathy Horyn called this thinking "hazy" and I have to agree. But how does one write anything definitive about color? See my post in April called "Rules for Picking Colors."

Above is my image of a wild iris. It is probably close to the color of the year.

Beauty Under Attack

Cover of the book Regarding Beauty by Neal David Benezra

A recent conversation with Deanna Dikeman has made me go back to the books to try to understand the place of beauty in art today. I have to admit I find the whole issue a bit puzzling. How could it be that the words "Art" and "Beauty" would not be linked? Neal David Benezra wrote a book on this topic in 1999: Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late Twentieth Century. 

In the preface he writes:

While ascribing beauty to art may seem natural and appropriate, in recent decades beauty and contemporary art have been considered virtually incongruous. In an art world increasingly focused on global issues and social concerns, artists and critics alike have questioned beauty's efficacy and relevance for contemporary culture. Suggesting frivolity, the machinations of the art market, and a lack of seriousness and social purpose, beauty has indeed come under severe attack. The assault on beauty by the contemporary art world has left a confused and baffled art-viewing public uncertain about one of the very cornerstones of Western art and culture, namely, the pursuit of beauty.

Peter Schjeldahl is my favorite art critic. He wrote in the New Yorker in 1999:

We don’t depend on new art to provide us with beauty, which is just as well. Don’t blame the artists for this. Ever since art lost the patronage of clerics and aristocrats who required beauty to justify their authority, it has been stuck with serving the scarcely voluptuous agendas of bureaucratic and educational institutions, novelty-craving commerce, political ideologies, and, in the best instances, rawly ambitious and audacious individuals...

Beauty harmonizes consciousness from top to bottom. It is as organically vital as digestion. Beauty is - or ought to be - no big deal, though the lack of it is. Without regular events of beauty, we live estranged from all existence, including our own.