The Arts Make Everything Better

Across every art form, creative practice helps people endure illness, injury, grief, and trauma. The arts make difficult experiences easier to hold. They reduce isolation, restore a sense of agency, and help the body and mind begin the work of recovery.

Sometimes making art gives a person somewhere else to place the intensity of living.

Hunter Biden has described painting as central to his recovery from addiction. It kept him occupied, helped him avoid triggers, and redirected the intense focus that had once fed his substance use. He has called painting “literally keeping me sane” and, more recently, a meditative practice that creates a “liberating space between stimulus and response.”

Painting also gave him an identity apart from public scrutiny. It became a private place to process difficult emotions and regain some control over his own story.

This is one man’s account, not a generalizable outcome. But recovery is lived one person at a time, and testimony is evidence of another kind.

Sometimes art helps by changing the terms of an experience.

My brother Ron, a retired theater educator who uses a wheelchair, still keeps a box of red foam clown noses in a closet at home. When he was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer, his physical disability made radiation therapy especially unpleasant. By his final session, he did not think he could go through with it again.

So he struck a deal: he would endure the treatment if he and the technicians all wore clown noses.

They agreed.

That small act of theater eased the experience for everyone in the room. And, for once, Ron was not simply the subject of the procedure. He was directing it.

Sometimes art reaches people when ordinary language no longer can.

Music can connect with people living with dementia in ways conversation often cannot. A familiar song may unlock memories and emotions long after speech and recall begin to fade, giving caregivers and loved ones another way in.

Singing along, rather than simply listening, appears to offer the greatest benefit. Studies point to modest improvements in memory, attention, mood, and quality of life, along with reduced anxiety and agitation.

A person does not need to sustain a conversation to follow a melody or remember the words to an old song. Singing will not slow the disease itself, but it can help someone remain connected to others and to themselves even as other abilities decline.

The arts do more than comfort people receiving care. They can also change how care is understood, practiced, and experienced.

The arts and humanities help healthcare professionals develop capacities that clinical knowledge alone cannot supply. They teach practitioners to look closely, listen carefully, tolerate uncertainty, and recognize the person within the patient. They can even strengthen the technical skills on which diagnosis and treatment depend.

Looking carefully is a clinical skill.

Most people consider looking at paintings a pleasant but peripheral activity. An Art, Observation, and Medicine course at Kansas City University, developed with the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, suggests otherwise.

Medical trainees who practiced structured observation of artworks noticed more details, expanded their descriptive vocabulary, and spent more time analyzing visual information. Those abilities transfer directly to examining a patient’s skin, face, movement, and posture.

The surprise is not that art might make clinicians more thoughtful. It is that looking at art can help them become more observant clinicians.

Care is shaped by the rooms, corridors, windows, and landscapes in which it occurs.

A review of nearly 700 rigorous studies found that hospital design can affect clinical outcomes, safety, and stress for patients and staff. Access to green space has been associated with lower staff stress and fewer errors, while evidence‑based design frequently identifies staff job satisfaction as one of the outcomes most affected.

A 2024 systematic review of biophilic design, including natural light, greenery, and views of nature, also found reduced stress among healthcare providers. Patients experienced benefits that included less pain and shorter hospital stays.

Architecture does not merely contain care. It participates in care.

Medical information becomes more useful when people can recognize themselves within it.

In one randomized trial, Hispanic adults with poorly controlled type 2 diabetes watched culturally tailored, Spanish‑language videos in which people told stories about managing the disease. After three months, blood sugar levels improved in both the storytelling and control groups. Adjusted analysis found a modest additional improvement among those who watched the stories, and patients found the approach highly acceptable in a primary‑care setting.

The study does not prove that storytelling alone improves health. It does suggest that people may hear medical guidance differently when it arrives through familiar voices, experiences, and cultural frames.

A story can carry information across a distance that instructions alone may never cross.

What creative practice can do for patients and healthcare professionals, it can also do for the institutions and policies that shape our common life.

The Res Creativa Opportunity Docket, now being finalized by our founding members, considers how imagination, empathy, collaboration, and experimentation might open new ways of educating, governing, caring, and living together.

Soon, we will invite others to add their names in support of these possibilities. It will be an invitation to help restore human judgment, connection, and dignity to a world increasingly organized as though people were problems to be processed.

The coming ‘New Restoration’ will need artists and allies who understand that the arts belong wherever human lives are being shaped. Not as decoration after consequential decisions have been made, but as a way of seeing, questioning, imagining, and making those decisions.

Just as the arts can return the person to the center of professional practice, creative practice can also return humanity to all systems meant to serve it.

P.S. We’re going to need more clown noses.

A version of this post was also published on Substack, Sep 8, 2026

Banner image: © epiximages / Adobe Stock