Daisy Fancourt’s book ‘Art Cure’ considers how art affects our health and social life – and can help you eat your five-a-day
I’ve been looking at art for decades. Although it’s probably made me somewhat happier, having an ‘arts experience’ (as scientist Daisy Fancourt calls it) hasn’t rescued me from moments of depression or, for that matter, done much for my blood pressure. Maybe this writer is not the best person to review Art Cure, Fancourt’s enthusiastic, true-believer exposition of how the arts can make a positive effect on health, both mental and physical.
But then, it could also be that my health would have been worse had I not had all that arts experience. Fancourt, a professor of psychobiology and epidemiology, insists that this is so and marshals a dizzying edifice of studies, research and other factoids to prove it. ‘From preventing suicides to helping stop epidemics to even increasing our life expectancy, the arts can be the difference between life and death,’ she declares.
So over seven chapters Fancourt focuses on the various situations in which engaging in arts activities can have positive impacts on peoples’ health. This goes from ameliorating incidence of depression in large sample groups, to being an effective therapeutic intervention for people who have experienced trauma and abuse, to enhancing neuroplasticity, to restoring function after brain damage, to staving off the onset of neurodegenerative disease, to managing pain and stress.
The problem with Art Cure is not so much that one might criticise the research methodologies, or the data (that would be the responsible job of scientists, not some art critic), but that the concept of ‘health’ Fanshaw adopts is so wide as to encompass what are really questions about the conduct of social life and even politics, ethics and morality. In her penultimate chapter, on ‘arts for healthy behaviours’, Fancourt starts with the example of East Los High (2013–17), a US TV high school drama created to target and modify the sexual-health behaviours of Latino teens. She then asserts that ‘just engaging in arts day-to-day… can also help us to act more healthily’, citing research that supposedly shows that ‘those who were more creative and culturally engaged were nearly twice as likely to also eat their five-a-day of fruit and veg’. There’s an element of unconscious class snobbery embedded in such apparently scientific observations; it just so happens that those ‘disengaged from arts groups and cultural activities… are more likely to also engage in other behaviours that can put their health at risk’. Fancourt might contend that class prejudice has nothing to do with it, but the technocratic outlook – of scientists, experts and policymakers figuring out what’s ‘best’ for us (though Fancourt never couches it so paternalistically) – is really the outlook of the ‘sensible’ managerial class as it seeks to govern everyone else.
Of course, that dynamic tends not to be seen as a problem in a culture in which individuals are obsessed with their health, while governments are obsessed with manipulating the behaviours of the apparently feckless masses. There is, however, a positive political aspect within Fancourt’s narrative, though her ‘arts for health’ optics cannot fulfil it. Fancourt regularly notes that the arts offer people a greater sense of control and agency through participating in cultural life, and that this agency leads to a better sense of self and active engagement. But correlating this truth with statistics on how people live marginally more healthy lives overwrites a health/illness paradigm onto what is really a moral and political imperative: that living an isolated, trammelled, overworked and joyless life will probably be bad for you, in all sorts of ways. Benevolent health-modification is no substitute for individual freedom and social prosperity. Art Cure reduces the value of the arts to that of a physiological pusher of happiness-buttons at the most individual level (Fancourt is always going on about dopamine released into the brain), and to propaganda at the social level.
In the end – as Fancourt’s glum graph shows – we all die, even though there may be a slight difference between those dying at eighty or ninety depending on how frequently we ‘engage’ with the arts. In truth the arts could never do much about longevity. In the Renaissance, most people didn’t live to see their fifties, however great the art was.
Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health by Daisy Fancourt. Cornerstone Press, £22 (hardcover)
From the March 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
