Sad art is everywhere, and it comes cheap. Somber art is rare, because somber means sorrow that keeps its shape after the tears dry, sorrow with gravity, no laugh track, no lifeline. Ask which art is the most somber of all and the question sets a brutal standard: the winner must be born of grief, must depict grief, must refuse every exit from grief, and must offer no joy and no gesture of human harmony anywhere in its making or its reception. That last clause is the killer. Art is a social act before it is anything else. A song wants an ear. The play wants a house. Every poem wants a voice to carry it. Harmony rides along in the address itself, before a single consoling note gets played, and so nearly every candidate for the darkest art in the world fails on delivery, whatever horrors it contains.

Continue reading → Fourteen Paintings for No One: The Most Somber Art Ever Made