Wait, what is that you say, medical people going to art museums as part of their medical meeting experience?
Why yes OF COURSE they should get all up close with art because how better to learn about the key capacities and tendencies at play in every interaction in medicine: the capacities and tendencies of oneself, of others, and of groups. Also: medical meetings tend to happen in interesting cities that pretty much always have an art museum holding a world of wonders, experiences, and question-catalyzers inside.
I’ve been inspired to design and art museum-based courses for healthcare professionals and to hook them up to medical meetings over the last few years. It all started with the American College of Physicians’ vision for their membership (Internal Medicine 2015, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and IM 2016 at the National Gallery, Washington, DC, which I wrote about here). And later this month my friends at the MFA Boston will be holding their own program at the very same time of the AAMC’s annual meeting in Boston – so I’m going to go ahead and say it: medical people going to art museums as part of their medical meeting experience IS A THING!
Today I want to write to you about an experience I had at such a thing last month in Kansas City.
I had the pleasure of collaborating with the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art on a workshop for 45 ASBH members.
Instead of writing about the pedagogical “aha moments,” I want to write about something that energized me on a level so personal I will always remember it.
This piece:
Thomas Hart Benton, American (1889-1975). Hollywood, 1937-1938. Tempera with oil on canvas, mounted on panel, 56 x 84 inches (142.2 x 213.7 cm). The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Bequest of the artist, F75-21/12. Photo: Jamison Miller. Art © T.H. Benton and R.P. Benton Testamentary Trusts/UMB Bank Trustee/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
By a stroke of strange timing, I had the experience of interacting with this piece twice and with two separate groups within the last two month: once shortly before the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke out, and once shortly after.
The groups shared some commonalities. Both groups were pretty evenly split between men and women. Both groups remarked on the women in the center who appears to be illuminated. Yet these two conversations could not have been more different.
In the first session, the conversation about the woman was (and I paraphrase) that she gets to be in the limelight, although her skin tone looks a bit dead and there are other women close by who look more alive yet are being ignored. This was not discussed so much as a problem but posited as a possible narrative more or less on the sideline of the conversation. The group’s main concern with this piece was its sense of chaos. They grappled with wanting to figure it out, the eye not being able to rest in any one particular spot, the narrative confusing. We had a productive reflection about encountering a patient case that feels similarly chaotic, feelings of frustration and dissatisfied desires to be able to close it quickly, and the importance of sharing reasoning aloud.
In the second conversation, it was remarked upon how challenging it was to see the picture as separate from the Harvey Weinstein scandal, the testimonials of hundreds of women having freshly landed in the consciousness of many in the room. One participant remarked on the chain of women brought in apparently by boat and ushered through a process of masking, derobing, filming, and, finally, removal—as the woman on the left apparently was in the process of experiencing.
“It’s the Hollywood machine,” remarked one participant, noting the vast machinery of the filming and lighting operations and the flow of the women churning through it, their similar qualities of their hairstyle and dress signifying them as cogs in the machine. Another participant agreed on the machine, though speculated it could be the same woman going through different stages of her life while in Hollywood.
“Meanwhile, look, civilization is burning in the background, and we are all completely distracted with Hollywood,” remarked another concerned bioethicist. (I shared his concern, but as a facilitator stayed completely neutral, obviously).
We talked about how what we previously know and are freshly thinking about colors what we see—and by nature our thinking. This happens for better (like the sign of social progress I saw in comparing these two conversations) and for worse (like availability bias, some of which may have been going on in our conversation).
We all have bias and simply have to acknowledge it. For starters…me. And I’m the teacher here so it’s extra important that I own mine. Here are three of my biases that may have been particularly alive in this conversation:
- I believe that artists sometimes have a way of signaling the future in what their work makes visible, and I tend to get inspired when I perceive that to be happening, as I did in this conversation.
- I believe that human nature will be tempted to give over to power, and sometimes it will stay upstanding and oftentimes it won’t. I believe this based on personal experience with plenty of collisions with patriarchal abuses of power in wide range of spheres.
- I believe no sphere is exempt, not even the spheres that teach about this stuff. This too: personal experience.
So, call me biased, or call me wise, either way I’ll always disclose it, and I’ll welcome your counterpoints to my beliefs. The older I get, the more important this gets to me, and the more questioning I have for the colleagues who skip that critical first slide–Disclosures–when they present their work. One’s own personal history influences what one observes. It is biology actualized. It is only when we remove the pessimism about bias that we can begin to move through them.
Abuse of power and the herds of silencers surrounding it is older than the oldest painting on the wall of any museum anywhere. We’ve known forever. But these conversations showed me that as of October 2017, right now we’re a little less sleepy about it. We see it.
I’ve been teaching about the connection between observation (what we picture) and language (how we describe what we picture) for years, but this conversation completely refreshed me in two big reminders:
- When we see it, we are freer to talk about it, with more words available. And we can, perhaps, more easily see what some are not at all surprised by what they see.
- The more we learn, the more we see. And the more we see, the more we learn. We can’t ever stop endeavoring in either. We can never stop sharing our reasoning. And we can’t ever stop listening, listening, listening. Medicine is one place where this work is essential across all domains and at the same time deeply personal. Which brings me back to the power of the art museum space…
Heartfelt thanks to those who will never stop.
PS – Visiting the Nelson-Atkins was a salve on my soul. If you have not been there: go. Stroll the sculpture garden and try not to remark upon all the juicy lifegiving forms at play in there. Admission is free so you can pop in with no pressure to see it all. Also: they have a staff band (a staff band!). When I arrived for my preparation day, the halls were filled with their rendition of La Bamba. Also I heard tales about previous events and fabulous costumes. If there are any organizational psychologists out there reading this, maybe go and do a study on the impact of this on workplace culture and effectiveness. I can tell you as someone who interacts with a lot of different staff at a lot of different sites: I think there’s a there there.
