Art is good for you, fellows
That is, if you don’t equate ballet with spinach:
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 associated with good health/good satisfaction with life/low anxiety and depression.”
Be like Popeye. Go to the museum.
PS: “Church attendance and going to sports events were linked to increased life satisfaction in women.”
I think there is a lot to be said for this, but I’m not sure how to make a guy go to a museum (much less the ballet!) who doesn’t want to go. In American guy culture, so much of this is tied up with machismo, sexual identity and (I’m sorry to say) homophobia.
I will say that my children are exposed to a pretty broad swath of the arts in their primary-school education. So I can’t criticize the education system for failing to hold up their end of the bargain. And in a sense, we are rather arts-saturated, if one considers television, film and popular music to be arts (and I do, albeit a lot of it isn’t very good or admirable).
Going to mass should be, among all the other things it is, an immersion into the arts. This is one reason that the trends during my lifetime with regard to architecture and decor leave me somewhat distraught.
Some year ago I read about a study which found that each year more people go to museums than go to professional football games. (The study, of course, didn’t count the people just watching the games at home.) But I think the notion that men generally resist the arts is just an urban legend stereotype. Maybe it’s because when I was a child it was my father who often took us to the museum, not my mother (though she was very arty). Or maybe it’s just New Orleans with its French influence. The French certainly don’t disparage male artists. They’re cherished.
Is this notion peculiar to the U.S.? What about Canada? The Mexicans treasure the arts.
Many major markets have AM radio stations devoted to talk about sports non-stop. I don’t know how many markets still have FM radio stations devoted to the fine arts, but I understand it’s a shrinking business.
Norway.
That is all.
Somehow I don’t think this mantra will be adopted by The Promise Keepers and their ilk.
But us intrinsically disordered folk have know this for YEARS!
Well, maybe one way to attract reluctant men to museums is to offer enticing food in the museum cafeteria? Something like PBJ: as Cam on “Modern Family” says, the perfect lunch–pear, Brie, and jambon.
:-)
William L – I agree with you. Food never fails! It’s the first rule of events marketing – feed ‘em and they will come.
Jim, glad you agree.
And I was just re-reading my travel journals from this past Christmas, when I spent time at the Tate Britain and the National Gallery in London, and wondering as I read, What is it with American men? Both galleries were chock-full of men–as many men as women.
I always find that to be the case with museums anywhere in Europe, as well.
And so I’m wondering what ails American men, in particular, when it comes to these gender fantasies and rigid notions about proper gender roles, and why so much in American culture is so rigidly (and ridiculously) gender-tagged.
It surely can’t be the food that brings men to the British museums, since it’s, well, England. And so the food’s decent, serviceable, wonderful to find on a cold winter’s day–but nothing at all to write home about.
The art museums could host a “Chopped” contest using ingredients limited to those portrayed in still lifes.
According to a National Endowment for the Arts survey in 1985, there was no appreciable difference between the attendance at art museums and art galleries by men or women. Per 1000 people, 23 percent of women said they had attended one in the previous twelve months, and 22 percent of men said they had.
http://nea.gov/research/reports/NEA-Research-Report-23.pdf
“What is it with American men? ”
Well, if things get, you know, too artsty-fartsy, and you like them then your masculinity and sexual orientation immediately come under suspicion.
If you connect art galleries to drinking beer and passing gas, maybe that might help.
Maybe that’s why the Guggenheim looks that way…
On this Memorial Day weekend, I have to wonder if there’s a connection with men in Europe frequenting museums that might not still be standing if not for the willingness and ability of American men to defend them, when European men could not do so.