The radicalism of having a good time

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There is a Paris restaurant menu from the winter of 1870 that sometimes circulates online. The city has been under Prussian siege for 99 days. Food is scarce. So, dear patron, try the stuffed donkey head. Or “le chat flanqué de rats”. And don’t allow the elephant consommé to go to waste. The great beasts were procured with some effort, and there are people starving outside.

Now let us cross-reference this glimpse of living hell with the art that has lasted from that time and place. From Degas, we have “The Dancing Class”, in which some girls rehearse ballet at the Paris Opéra. From Renoir, a promenading couple. By 1872, when painters have had time to process the trauma of defeat and occupation, Monet serves up a woman sitting among lilacs in “Springtime”. Sisley does a couple of nice bridges. Rarely has a group of artists passed up a bigger opportunity to dwell on misery. The work is, given the context, frivolous. It is also eternal.

The Impressionists saw no intrinsic value — aesthetic, moral, intellectual — in suffering. I wonder if our own age is as clear-thinking. The new candour about mental ill health, the removal of stigma from it, is the most useful cultural change of the past decade or so. Less essential is what Martin Amis called “one-downmanship”: a sort of competitive negativity. It is there in the boom in confessional literature. It is there in the wall-to-wall psychobabble. A good western chauvinist, I tend to think the reputation of the democratic world as “decadent” is outright slander. Then I see that there is now advice out there on how to “break up” with a friend.

Critics allowed Wham!’s outward hedonism, their Italian sportswear, to obscure their melodic craft, their wit

Degas to George Michael in one column is a risk. But here goes. For all sorts of reasons, the new Netflix documentary about Wham! is worth your time. Some of the retouched footage from the 1980s is a treat for the optic nerve. There is fresh information, at least for non-obsessive fans of the group. 

But the film’s ultimate value is as a warning in how easily joy is mistaken for emptiness, and suffering for depth. The cheeriest non-manufactured pop act of all time (their debut album was called Fantastic) enraged critics. When the pair shot a video in Ibiza, some dire-looking indie bores went on telly to deplore the shallowness and the crypto-Thatcherite materialism. It doesn’t help that Andrew Ridgeley is the breeziest man to have ever prospered in that den of neuroses we call the creative industries.

Four decades on, it is clearer who was being shallow, and it wasn’t Wham!. Critics allowed the group’s outward hedonism, their Italian sportswear, to obscure the melodic craft, the wit (“death by matrimony”) and the nerve it must have taken to entrust “Careless Whisper” to an august American producer three times their age, and then bin his recording as not good enough. The winnowing effect of time is said to be the closest thing that art has to a universal test of what is good and what isn’t. Well, though Ridgeley is too mild to spell it out in his narration, there isn’t a Netflix doc on his group’s dourer contemporaries, is there? And which has dated better since the 1980s: “Last Christmas”, or the idea that Morrissey is an intellectual?

One-downmanship does not just fail to guarantee artistic merit or psychological insight. It isn’t even subversive. The opposite way of going at life can be the real counterculture. The Wham! documentary has been faulted for not probing farther into dark matter — Michael’s shortened life, most obviously — but that would put it tonally in line with everything else out there. It would also smother the credo, even the “lesson”, of Wham!, which is that it is possible to make something of lasting value out of the pleasure principle. You can view the world with some relish without being an airhead.

I note in passing that both members of the duo are immigrants’ sons. There is nothing like relative newness to a rich country to perk one up. There is nothing like family lore about hardship to help one see through the phoney nobility of modern angst. Of course, at no point in the film does either man dwell on something so earnest.

janan.ganesh@ft.com