As we enter the Sunday of Summer, I wanted today to muse on a somewhat lighter topic than ones I have taken on of late—namely the aesthetics of a healthier world. Public health is an aspiration as much as it is a technical set of skills, tasks, and methodologies. It is, at core, the pursuit of a vision—a vision of a healthier world. This pursuit is more than a technical process. It is an imaginative, creative endeavor. It requires us to radically rethink what the world could be, so that our aspirations might support a future which is far better than our past. To imagine a radically healthier world is to imagine a world unlike one we have yet seen. Lacking this frame of reference means we need to draw on our creative capacities in envisioning this future. Doing so takes us beyond the realm of purely technical considerations, and into that of art and metaphor. I recently wrote the introduction to an “Arts and Public Health” supplement for the journal Health Promotion Practice. I am grateful to the editors for affording me a chance to think more about how art reflects and informs the forces that shape health. This Healthiest Goldfish is, in part, inspired by these prior reflections on the interplay of art and health and the work of many who have written on this topic. Leaning for a moment on the work of Leonard Bernstein who once said:
“Any great work of art…revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world, the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.”
This speaks to how art, through its aesthetic power, can shape a vision of a different world, one which invites the public to engage with new possibilities for how life could be. Is there any reason why the pursuit of health should be less visionary? Bernstein was a master of working within the medium of music to transport listeners to another place. His music for West Side Story, for example (with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim), takes those who hear it to an impressionistic, almost dreamlike version of New York City, which serves as the canvas for a tale of tragedy and young love. If such care can be taken to craft a fictional world for audiences to enjoy, public health, which seeks to create a new world in a literal sense, should be just as comfortable working within aesthetic domains as it is engaging with the more tangible aspects of our field.
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