Today is Blue Monday, supposedly the most depressing day of the year. But for many people, work always appears to get them down. Negative attitudes to our working lives have been consistent in the way work has been reflected by artists for at least the past hundred years. From Charlie Chaplin’s oppressed and endangered little tramp in Modern Times to Terry Gilliam’s fetid offices in Brazil. From Edward Hopper’s portrayals of the distances between workers to the cool symmetry of Andreas Gursky’s photography of offices and factories. From Orwell’s depiction of the future as a human face under a patriarchal jackboot to Tom Wolfe’s rich, successful but miserable and amoral masters of the universe in Bonfire of the Vanities. It is a worldview reflected in the media, where happiness writes white and what news there remains, is generally bad news fed by the agenda-furthering doom-mongering press releases of vested interests.
Forget all the talk of Blue Monday; work is still (largely) good for us