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这就叫业良嘻嘻：）打开微信，看真题，听凯文的朗读！我都被自己感动了！ 我觉得读的挺好的：）你觉得呢？ Many things make people think artists are weird.But the weirdest may be this: artists’ only job is to explore emotions, and yetthey choose to focus on the ones that feel bad. This wasn’t always so. The earliest forms of art,like painting and music, are those best suited for expressing joy. But somewherefrom the 19th century onward, more artists began seeing happiness as meaningless,phony or, worst of all, boring, as we went from Wordsworth’s daffodils to Baudelaire’sflowers of evil. You could argue that art became more skepticalof happiness because modern times have seen so much misery. But it’s not as if earliertimes 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 worldtoday. After all, what is the one modern form of expressionalmost completely dedicated to depicting happiness? Advertising. The rise of anti-happyart almost exactly tracks the emergence of mass media, and with it, a commercialculture in which happiness is not just an ideal but an ideology. People in earlier eras were surrounded by remindersof misery. They worked until exhausted, lived with few protections and died young.In the West, before mass communication and literacy, the most powerful mass mediumwas the church, which reminded worshippers that their souls were in danger and thatthey would someday be meat for worms. Given all this, they did not exactly needtheir art to be a bummer too. Today the messages the average Westerner issurrounded with are not religious but commercial, and forever happy. Fast-food eaters,news anchors, text messengers, all smiling, smiling, smiling. Our magazines featurebeaming celebrities and happy families in perfect homes. And since these messageshave an agenda -- to lure us to open our wallets -- they make the very idea of happinessseem unreliable. “Celebrate!” commanded the ads for the arthritis drug Celebrex,before we found out it could increase the risk of heart attacks. But what we forget -- what our economy dependson us forgetting -- is that happiness is more than pleasure without pain. The thingsthat bring the greatest joy carry the greatest potential for loss and disappointment.Today, surrounded by promises of easy happiness, we need art to tell us, as religiononce did, Memento mori: remember thatyou will die, that everything ends, and that happiness comes not in denying thisbut in living with it. It’s a message even more bitter than a clove cigarette, yet,somehow, a breath of fresh air.
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