The Power of the Bleak: An Ode to Sad Art

Written by Liv Mazzola

Photographed by McKenna Smith

I am no stranger to melancholic art. Memoirs written by the grief-stricken, haunting melodies that result in tears, and unconventionally dark Tim Burton movies have always held the top spots on my shelf of favorites.

This admiration for sad art has been present ever since my first memory of connecting to music when I was seven years old: I heard “Für Elise” playing on my mother’s music box, and gasped at how the simple melody tugged at my heartstrings. I felt a mix of emotions I didn’t even know the meaning of yet: gloominess, wistfulness, wonder, and angst.

A few years later, I experienced loss and grief before even graduating elementary school. Emotions of sorrow that were all too big for my 10-year-old self to comprehend manifested deep within me. Amidst this unchartered territory of grief, I found myself relying on the familiar feelings that the music box gave me just a few years before. Simply hearing a mournful melody that emulated my feelings or watching a film that dealt with grief had the power to help me understand a part of myself I wasn’t yet able to address on my own.

To this day I still prefer sad music and enjoy sad books, and cannot help but be fascinated by this idea of why people like to use art to revel in their sadness. According to Psychology Today, the phenomenon of people avoiding sad emotions in real life, but feeling drawn to sadness in art, is called “the paradox of tragedy.” Despite it being a common pattern, there is no one answer to explain why this phenomenon even happens in the first place, but many theories exist.

I am not the first to be curious about why people love tragic art. In fact, this curiosity was first recorded in 330 BCE when Aristotle addressed the appeal of tragic art in Poetics. He theorized that the reason why sadness in art is so loved is because it allows us to address negative emotions with complete catharsis, giving us a sense of enjoyment.

Picking up where Aristotle left off, I sought out to discover what some of my Emerson peers find so appealing about tragic art. Heather Thorn, class of ’27, is a self-proclaimed lover of all things sad art. Her favorite author is Sylvia Plath because Plath “knows sadness like no other.” For Thorn, “It’s a very powerful experience to revel in sadness. There's a comfort in witnessing someone else express their own sadness through art.” Not only does sad art help her feel understood, but it also gives her gratitude: “It makes me feel more appreciative for the happiness that I do feel throughout the day. Sad art helps me know myself better and know the world better.” For Thorn, sad books, music, shows, or media of any kind give her a comfort that other genres cannot do.

Shannon Cullen, also class of ’27, is another Emerson student who often finds the beauty in tragic art. For Cullen, sad music is an integral part of her life and well-being. “I experience emotions very deeply and it’s been like that my whole life . . . I’ve learned to appreciate how I feel things. That’s why I like listening to sad songs; because I feel like I can take in and understand the music.” When asked what exactly makes a sad song a comforting one, Cullen says it’s all about the lyrics. “The artists I listen to, Elliot Smith and Adrienne Lenker, write songs like poetry. Poetry is a way to describe emotions like nothing else can. Their lyrics make me feel comforted and understood, which weirdly makes me feel happy.” It may sound counterintuitive, but the feeling that Cullen describes as happiness from witnessing sad art is common, and is a major aspect of the paradox of tragedy.

As humans, we have no greater desire than to feel understood and connected. Perhaps the reason we are drawn to sad art is because it gives us a chance to face our pain while holding the hand of the artists we relate to so deeply. We suddenly realize that we are not alone in the sorrows that life throws at us when artists turn their pain into works of art. To feel understood is to feel loved, and that is most apparent in this paradox of tragedy.