How capitalism killed sleep

What can you make a joke about these days? All the old butts of humour are off limits. No wonder the top ten jokes at the Edinburgh Fringe are starting to sound as though they were banged out in a cracker factory. But this one, from Ross Smith, did make me laugh: ‘Sleep is my favourite thing in the world. It’s the reason I get up in the morning.’

If laughter is an escape valve for our fears, then sleep, or the lack of it, is now comic material. When 10 per cent of the population pops sleeping pills at least three times a week, self-help books about sleep — yawn, yawn — are international bestsellers and the President of the United States is up tweeting before the birds, something has gone awry in the land of nod. Meanwhile 19 per cent of us are online for more than 40 hours a week. Could the statistics be related? The curators of 24/7 think we should be told.

Inspired by Jonathan Crary’s book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Somerset House’s new exhibition brings together works by 50 multidisciplinary artists examining the root causes of our sleeplessness and proposing solutions. The trouble started, obviously, with artificial light, but before the Industrial Revolution burning the midnight oil was an indulgence of the educated classes who could afford the fuel, and the laudanum, to counter the effects. Then along came gas lighting and 24-hour production, and bang went the body clocks of the working classes.

The northern painter of lamplight, Joseph Wright of Derby, made one of the first visual records of round-the-clock production in the 1790s when he painted ‘Arkwright’s Cotton Mills by Night’ with all its windows lit up like an advent calendar at Christmas.