If you feel like getting drunk and bingeing on TV this weekend who can blame you? I can, however, suggest works of art that may help with political grieving

How to find solace in dark times: there's always art to look up to

I was thrashing around for something that could get me out of the shocked torpor I felt after the election results dropped. After my parents died a few years ago, it was rock’n’roll I turned to. Not now.

The Rolling Stones are out, obviously. I don’t think I can listen to You Can’t Always Get What You Want ever again after hearing it at the end of Trump’s victory speech. Springsteen? No – the stories his songs tell – of blue-collar guys desperate for a break – dramatize the kinds of rust belt sadness that made some people vote for Trump.

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As it is, for now, Trump owns Born to Run. He owns Johnny Cash, Meatloaf and Elvis too. Rock music, the most consoling art form the modern world has invented, with its roots in the melancholy of the blues, has been Trumped. The strangest sight watching his victory party on TV was a placard saying Bikers for Trump: this is the moment of the baby boomers, electing a man who perhaps reflects the narcissism of the hippy era as the ultimate bad trip.

So no, for anyone seeking solace in Trump’s hour of triumph, American classic rock is not the answer.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Not helping: Bruce Springsteen. Photograph: Mark Makela/Reuters

Few people, when catastrophe strikes, turn to joyous pop or sensual dance beats. We listen to sad songs instead, because they mirror our pain, because they give it form and poetry. Art does not console us through bland escapism, but by re-enacting and amplifying our sorrow. In short, it shares our pain. The morning after my mother died, I kept an appointment to see an exhibition about Pompeii at the British Museum. It helped to look at the agonized poses of people killed by a volcano nearly 2,000 years ago, preserved by ash. Their silent howls mirrored my dumb sorrow.

In the same way, perhaps art can offer solace at this time of political bereavement.

The rise of Trump has wantonly destroyed the age of comparative political reason that prevailed since 1945. Racist, misogynist – sure, he’s those things but the real nightmare is that Trump has won through sheer irrationalism and stream-of-consciousness appeals to the least cogent regions of the human psyche. He’s unleashed lurid forces that seemed to have vanished from mainstream politics when the Allies won the second world war. The safe boring world we grew up in is dead and we’ve no idea what awaits our children.

If you just feel like getting drunk and bingeing on TV this weekend, who would blame you? I can, however, suggest some works of art that may help with a more constructive and cathartic process of political grieving.

I have chosen them on the principle that real artistic solace comes not from escapism but a tragic recognition of fellowship in loss.

The Robert Gould Shaw Memorial in Boston

If you are anywhere near Boston, you may want to make a pilgrimage to the Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment on Boston Common.

This American masterpiece by Augustus Saint-Gaudens portrays a white officer leading black soldiers towards a common death in the civil war. It can easily be faulted for its assumptions – Shaw is at the centre of the scene, raised on his horse, as if he mattered more – but it was created in 1884 and surely one lesson from the election of 2016 is that forging a community of kindness and respect matters more than obsessing over details of expression and nuance.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, in Boston. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

The 54th Regiment and their commander march together into the valley of the shadow of death, volunteering themselves in sacrifice for a better tomorrow. If you can’t get to the monument, read Robert Lowell’s great poem about it called For the Union Dead:

“Two months after after marching through Boston,

half the regiment was dead …

Their monument sticks like a fishbone

in the city’s throat.

Its Colonel is as lean

as a compass-needle.”

Lowell, writing in the era of growing American affluence and consumerism, saw in this austere monument to the unbending idealists of the 1860s a relic of a lost America, a stiff and puritan Republic whose values were actually better and braver.

Today, the Republic seems more degraded than he could possibly imagine in the 1960s. The Memorial on Boston Common is witness to a history of hard-won progress that Donald Trump has spat on with his words of fear and loathing, just as he promises to make it as if there never was a Barack Obama in the White House.

Andy Warhol’s paintings of Jackie Kennedy

There have been defeats before. The republic has been declining for a long time – “The ditch is nearer,” wrote Lowell in 1964. That same year, Andy Warhol painted a series of silkscreen portraits of Jackie Kennedy at her husband’s funeral in Arlington Cemetery in late 1963.

You can’t build a wall to hide the stories of immigration that made America

Warhol’s Jackie is a ravaged yet noble figure of mourning, a mater dolorosa for the nation, conveying in her composed agony the loss of JFK to an assassin’s bullet. Now it looks to me as if she mourns America itself. Her bleak face sees the days that are here now, and she weeps. It’s getting bad when the past weeps for the present.

Arshile Gorky’s portrait of his mother

Sorry, is this offering solace at all? Art is not an anti-depressant. It heals by making us see the truth, not numbing it. Arshile Gorky’s portrait of his mother, in the Whitney Museum, is a harrowing act of memory and witness. Gorky was born Armenian near Lake Van. In 1919, his mother died from starvation after they were driven from their home on a genocidal hunger march.

You can’t build a wall to hide the stories of immigration that made America. Gorky is one of America’s greatest artists. His work has the solace of an enduring truth.

The Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas

It is because art heals when it is most courageous and unblinking that so many visitors find solace in the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. People come to this ecumenical chapel to pray in all faiths and none. I once heard a group there searching for life lessons in Bob Dylan’s words. Yet the paintings here are black and empty and eerie. Rothko’s abstract veils of colour gather you into their numinous despair. They embrace you with the anguish of a soul in Hades. Rothko takes you to the end of the night yet as you emerge into the Texas sun the weighty memory of his art stays with you. It reassures you that another soul too feels lonely, feels confused, feels human.

Barnett Newman’s sculpture Broken Obelisk

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Broken Obelisk, Rothko Chapel, Houston, Texas. Photograph: Alamy

Near the chapel stands Barnett Newman’s sculpture Broken Obelisk, a colossal impossibility, one point apparently balanced on another, supporting immense weight, forever suspended, forever incomplete. Newman intended Broken Obelisk as a memorial to John F Kennedy. It now seems more than ever monument to the breaking of America itself.

All great art is consoling because it transfigures our ordinary feelings into something bigger. Gorky, Rothko and Newman are among America’s supreme artists because their tragic vision of life is so elevated, noble and austere. How did the nation that gave the world Donald Trump also give us the Abstract Expressionists? This is not a trivial question. Trump is a direct product of cultural decline. The art of Rothko is as remote from the age of Trump as the rigid idealists on the Shaw Memorial in Boston.

Martin Scorsese’s film The King of Comedy

It is painfully, embarrassingly obvious that reality television and social media have led the 21st century into a hell of idiocy whose king is now a president. So if you really want the solace that comes of art that is true, if you really want to see a monstrous mirror of this vileness we have come to, watch Martin Scorsese’s film The King of Comedy.

This film, about two deranged fans who kidnap a TV talkshow host, portrays the decline of the American dream with such clarity that no one involved was ever the same again – Robert de Niro retreated to safer roles, and even Scorsese himself has never returned to this level of crystal-clear apocalyptic revelation. Watch the main character’s standup act, with his strange hand gestures and dead eyed “jokes”, then watch Trump. Did he actually learn his act by watching him?

As Van Morrison sings in Wonderful Remark over The King of Comedy’s opening titles, “Now, how can we listen to you / When we know your talk is cheap …?”

It’s a question historians will be asking of the Trump era – provided of course there are historians around to study it. It’s not that reassuring to live in a time that is outdoing the most pessimistic predictions of apocalyptic works of art. There may simply not be any solace available, unless it is the solace a patient takes from finally being told the worst.