Many things make people think artists are weird--the odd hours, the nonconformity, the clove cigarettes. But the weirdest may be this: artists' only job is to explore emotions, and yet they choo to focus on the ones that feel lousy. Art today can give you anomie, no problem. Bittersweetness? You got it. Tristes? What size you want that in? But great art, as defined by tho in the great-art-defining business, is almost never about simple, unironic happiness.
This wasn't always so. The earliest forms of art, like painting and music, are tho best suited for expressing joy. But somewhere in the 19th century, more artists began eing happiness as insipid, phony or, worst of all, boring--in Tolstoy's words, "All happy families are alike." We went from Wordsworth's daffodils to Baudelaire's flowers of evil. In the 20th century, classical music became more atonal, visual art more unttling. Artists who focud on making their audiences feel good, from Usher to Thomas Kinkade, were labeled "pop."
Sure, there have been exceptions (say, Matis's The Dance), but it would not be a stretch
to say that for the past century or so, rious art has been at war with happiness. In 1824, Beethoven completed the "Ode to Joy." In 1962, novelist Anthony Burgess ud it in A Clockwork Orange as the favorite piece of his ultraviolent antihero. If someone titles an art movie Happiness, it is a good bet that it will be--as the 1998 Todd Solondz film was--about deeply unhappy people, including a telephone pervert and a pedophile.
You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness becau modern times have en such miry. But it's not as if earlier times didn't know perpetual war, disaster and the massacre of innocents. The reason, in fact, may be just the opposite: there is too much damn happiness in the world today.
obeyAfter all, what is the one modern form of expression almost completely dedicated to depicting happiness? Advertising. The ri of anti-happy art almost exactly tracks the emergence of mass media, and with it, a commercial culture in which happiness is not just an ideal but an ideology.
People in earlier eras were surrounded by reminders of miry. They worked gruelingly, li
ved with few protections and died young. In the West, before mass communication and literacy, the most powerful mass medium was the church, which reminded worshippers that their souls were in peril and that they would someday be meat for worms. On top of all this, they did not exactly need their art to be a bummer too.where
女孩英语怎么说Today the messages your average Westerner is bombarded with are not religious but commercial, and relentlessly happy. Fast-food eaters, news anchors, text mesngers, all smiling, smiling, smiling, except for that guy who keeps losing loans to Ditech. Our magazines feature beaming celebrities and happy families in perfect homes. (Tolstoy clearly never edited a shelter mag.) And since the messages have an agenda--to pry our wallets from our pockets--they make the very idea of happiness em bogus. "Celebrate!" commanded the ads for the arthritis drug Celebrex, before we found out it could increa the risk of heart attacks.
三年级上册英语第一课
scissors是什么意思It gets exhausting, this constant goad to joy. If you're not smiling--after we made all tho wonderful pills and cell-phone plans!--what's wrong with you? Not to smile is un-American.
托福必备词汇
You can pick out the Americans in a crowd of tourists by their reflexive grins. The U.S. enshrined in its founding document the right to the pursuit of happiness. So we pursued it and--at least as commerce defines it--we caught it.
Now, like the dog that chad and finally caught the car, we don't know what the hell to do with it. We feel vaguely dissatisfied though we have what we should want, vaguely guilty for wanting it, vaguely angry becau it didn't come as advertid. People tsk-tsked over last month's study in which women reported being happier having x or watching TV than playing with their kids. But why shouldn't they? This is how the market defines happiness. Happiness is feeling good. Kids, tho who exist outside ads, make you feel bad--exhausted, frustrated, bored and poor. Then they move away and break your heart.
tinyeyes
What we forget--what our economy depends on us forgetting--is that happiness is more than pleasure sans pain. The things that bring the greatest joy carry the greatest potential for loss and disappointment. Today, surrounded by promis of easy happiness, we need someone to tell us that it is O.K. not to be happy, that sadness makes happiness deeper. 洋气的英文
my hapiness什么意思As the wine-connoisur movie Sideways tells us, it is the kiss of decay and mortality that makes grape juice into Pinot Noir. We need art to tell us, as religion once did, Memento mori: remember that you will die, that everything ends, and that happiness comes not in denying this but in living with it. It's a message even more bitter than a clove cigarette, yet, somehow, a breath of fresh air.
