A New Literature Review Updates the Field

September 2, 2022 Hank Hancock

Open books laid out across in an overlapping array

A recent literature review appeared quietly last year in a clinical medical journal. 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. 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.

As a sort of thought experiment, pretend you had no idea what art – visual art – might be, and you tried to formulate some concept of it by reading "A Guide to Evidence-Based Art.” You would certainly come away with at least one salient idea, that visual art has content. The list of features that are most often repeated and specified in the field are described as “art content.” This conception tellingly passes over a middle term, that of the image. Artwork contains images, and those images may be pictures, depictions of persons, places, or things. Or they may not. To put it simply, visual art may be “representational” or “abstract.”