Woe is me.

Is it me or does the phrase ‘the misery of the human condition’ make everyone cringe? Last week I walked into an art gallery where that phrase was plastered over the wall to explain the ‘theory’ behind a series of photographs of old people dancing on a promenade. Please forgive me for failing to see the misery in something so touching as old couples boogying.

The real bone this makes me want to pick at is why we feel the need to justify everything in art through the eyes of archaic philosophies. Cannot something just be beautiful? Do we really need to have an obscure message behind every camera lens.

I once asked my flamboyant English teacher why we only studied depressing books – ‘Death of a Salesman’, ‘Of Mice and Men’ and so on. Without missing a beat he responded “Happiness writes white, dear girl” and minced off.  There is no doubt some truth in the phrase especially when writing a play or novel in which plot and narrative structure demand misery to make us cry so that we feel elated when we allowed to laugh.

Poets are probably the worst for making misery a highbrow artistic activity, Wendy Cope wrote a wonderful poem expostulating about how comic poems must enter different competitions from ‘real’ poems and of course be rewarded with smaller prizes. If you have to be miserable to be in the arts then in seems strange that we all congregate here aspiring to get into the industry. There is nothing elegant about suffering and mental hospitals with barred windows and the stench of disinfectant.

Beautiful doesn’t have to be tragic and entertainment doesn’t have to be crass. While Vincent Van Gogh and Glee make excellent examples of tragic beauty and crass entertainment respectively there is also a whole world of examples to fight the other side of the argument. The old British sitcoms Yes Minister and The Good Life, the William Tell overture, Queen’s entire back catalogue or whimsical graffiti. 

A beautifully Yorkshire favourite of mine near Hallam Uni.

It’s all a question of balance. While it seems to be true that the best of each genre is often focussed on painful truths there will be so many examples where this has gone wrong leaving the artist with something pretentious and trite that they hastily zip to the recycle bin.

Misery of the human condition? Pah! We get enough of that on the news. Here’s a brief from me – I challenge you to make me laugh.