Feeling better already...? Part of Elmgreen and Dragset's installation The Welfare Show at the Serpentine Gallery, London, January 2006
Suffering from high blood pressure? Maybe your taste in art is to blame.
According to a story that surfaced in Canada a few days back and has just crashed onto these shores, a hospital in Ottawa has taken down several paintings from its walls because, well, they were stressing out patients.
One work is branded "creepy" because the subjects' eyes followed observers across the room (definitely a bit suspect, medically speaking). Another caused patients' blood pressures to soar within hours of being put up. Yet another had a line across it that read: "Getting there is half the fun" - but not so much fun, apparently, if you're about to head into the operating theatre. Where the painting was hung.
From the grainy photos on offer, it's difficult to say how justifiable the fuss is. They don't look to be the most inspiring works, it's true, but then I can't say that they have much effect on my blood pressure either.
What really does send it skyrocketing, however, are the words of one Sharon Mintz, art therapist, quoted in the CBC report. Ms Mintz opines that art in hospitals should be bland, and nothing but: "No pussycats playing bridge, dogs playing poker or Elvis on velvet," she opines, helpfully. "But there are a lot more comfortable works of art, watercolours, softer pastels, something that will inspire relaxation in a situation like that."
Blimey. I can't think of many things more likely to send me into hypertensive shock than the prospect of finding myself bedridden in a room with the kind of thing you see on Watercolour Challenge.
Of course hospitals are sensitive environments, and whoever curated the paintings in Ottawa seems to have messed up - but why do we sneer at the prospect of allowing unusual, interesting art into places where people are sick? Gusts of derision greeted the decision by University College Hospital to spend £70,000 on a sculpture by John Aiken (though elsewhere it was pugnaciously defended) for its entrance, likewise the £400,000 spent by NHS South West on commissioning contemporary art projects in 2005.
But if we're ill do our brains somehow turn to mush? Can't we handle anything more engaging or stimulating than something tasteful in pastel?
Please. Give me the more medical bits of Caravaggio if I'm sick, though Elmgreen and Dragset might just be pushing it. Or pussycats playing bridge, if they make me think or feel differently about just having had a heart attack. Yes, spend money on saving lives, but spend it on something that makes life actually worth living, too.
At least there's a small nugget of comfort buried in this story. Another of the Ottawan paintings, described in news reports with memorable concision as "depicting a gorilla", was removed to what was deemed a more appropriate site, in a loo. Marcel Duchamp would be proud.
