Art: It's Good for You...No, Really | Open Thread

I've noted it several times, that many of the collectors we work with view gallery hopping and buying art as a way to relax, which is why we try to get younger artists with unrealistic demands about the way their work is collected to understand how that can hurt their markets. When it stops being fun and/or relaxing for them, many collectors stop collecting. Which is understandable when you realize how many of them have high-profile, high-stress jobs.

Now there is evidence that art can indeed help you relax and make you a healthier person in the process...well, for men anyway. From MSNBC:

Men who enjoy taking in the ballet or browsing art museums are more likely to be happy with their lives and satisfied with their health than men who don't enjoy the finer things in life, a new study finds.

And although greater enjoyment of cultural activities is associated with higher income, the arts have a beneficial effect regardless of other factors that might influence health and happiness, including socioeconomic status.

The results suggest that encouraging cultural participation may be one way to encourage healthfulness, the authors reported online May 23 in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

"There has been a focus on physical activity as an instrument to promote good health in the last decades, but who is sure that all people are equally capable of doing five days a week of intensive training?" said study author Koenraad Cuypers of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in an email to LiveScience. "I doubt it! Studies suggest that 50 percent of leisure time is spent in other activities than physical activity, so we aimed at investigating whether participation in cultural activities would also be asociated with good health/good satisfaction with life/low anxiety and depression.

The gender disparity here is hard to figure out, though:

"Men seemed to get more of a percieved health benefit from being involved in different receptive cultural activites than women did," Cuypers said, adding that in both genders, there was a dose-response effect: The more activities a person participated in, the happier they tended to be.

Health, happiness and gallery openings
In other studies, Cuypers wrote, high cultural participation has been linked to increased physical activity, suggesting that a taste for the arts is a marker for an otherwise healthy lifestyle.

The article doesn't suggest that art isn't also good for women, just that the benefits to men seem to be higher. Perhaps it's just how differently men are treated in arts settings from the way they're treated in the business world and/or home settings.

Consider this an open thread on why art is good for you.