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做英语阅读做到的一篇觉得挺有趣的文章，讨论了为什么很多人觉得艺术家很怪，很负面，引伸出现代社会的人们surrounded by promises of easy happiness。找到了原文跟大家分享一下。
另给对英语原文不感冒的人附上翻译。
2006年text4
来源：Times美国版
The Art of Unhappiness
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 choose to focus on the ones that feel lousy. Art today can give you anomie, no problem. Bittersweetness? You got it. Tristesse? What size you want that in? But great art, as defined by those 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 those best suited for expressing joy. But somewhere in the 19th century, more artists began seeing 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 unsettling. Artists who focused on making their audiences feel good, from Usher to Thomas Kinkade, were labeled "pop."
Sure, there have been exceptions (say, Matisse's The Dance), but it would not be a stretch to say that for the past century or so, serious art has been at war with happiness. In 1824, Beethoven completed the "Ode to Joy." In 1962, novelist Anthony Burgess used 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 because modern times have seen such misery. 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.
After all, what is the one modern form of expression almost completely dedicated to depicting happiness? Advertising. The rise 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 misery. They worked gruelingly, lived 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.
Today the messages your average Westerner is bombarded with are not religious but commercial, and relentlessly happy. Fast-food eaters, news anchors, text messengers, 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 these messages have an agenda--to pry our wallets from our pockets--they make the very idea of happiness seem bogus. "Celebrate!" commanded the ads for the arthritis drug Celebrex, before we found out it could increase the risk of heart attacks.
It gets exhausting, this constant goad to joy. If you're not smiling—after we made all those wonderful pills and cell-phone plans!—what's wrong with you? Not to smile is un-American. 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 chased 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 because it didn't come as advertised. People tsk-tsked over last month's study in which women reported being happier having sex 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, those who exist outside ads, make you feel bad—exhausted, frustrated, bored and poor. Then they move away and break your heart.
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 promises of easy happiness, we need someone to tell us that it is O.K. not to be happy, that sadness makes happiness deeper. As the wine-connoisseur 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. ■
许多事情让人们以为艺术家是怪人——工作时间不规律，不墨守成规，抽叶子烟等。但最怪异的也许在于：艺术家的惟一工作是探讨各种情感，但却选择把焦点放在感觉糟糕的人身上。今天的艺术能让你生活无目的又无章法，这没什么问题。有苦有乐吗？你说对了。郁闷吗？你想要多郁闷就有多郁闷。但是，正如界说伟大艺术的行家所定义的，伟大的艺术几乎从来不描写单纯而不带讥讽的快乐。
情况也不总是如此。最早的艺术形式，如绘画和音乐，是最适于表达快乐的。但到了１９世纪的某个时候，越来越多的艺术家开始把快乐看作是乏味的、虚假的，或者最糟糕的，是使人厌倦的——用托尔斯泰的话说，“所有幸福的家庭都千篇一律”。我们从华兹华斯的黄水仙花走到了波德莱尔的恶之花。在２０世纪，古典音乐越来越向无调音乐发展；视觉艺术越来越使人焦躁不安。注重给受众带来好感的艺术家们，从亚瑟小子到托马斯金卡德，都被贴上了“通俗”的标签。
当然也有些例外（比如，马蒂斯的《舞蹈》），但可以毫不牵强地说，在过去的大约一个世纪里，严肃艺术一直与快乐相冲突。１８２４年，贝多芬完成了《欢乐颂》。１９６２年，小说家安东尼伯吉斯在《发条橙》中将它作为书中极端粗暴的反英雄最喜欢的乐曲。如果有人把一部艺术片题名为“幸福”，可以断言那一定是像托德∠伦兹１９９８年拍摄的影片——描写极为不幸的人们，包括一个打骚扰电话的变态狂和一个恋童癖患者。
你可以辩称，艺术之所以越来越怀疑快乐是因为现代社会历经这样的痛苦。但这不是说以前的时代没有经历过连续不断的战争、灾难和滥杀无辜。事实上，真正的原因可能恰恰相反：今天的世界上有太多的他妈的快乐了。
归根到底，几乎完全致力于描写快乐的那种现代表现方式是什么呢？广告。反快乐艺术的兴起几乎完全与大众传媒同步出现，而随之兴起了一种商业文化，在这种文化中，快乐不仅是一个理想，而且是一种意识形态。
早些时代的人们处于令其处处想到悲苦的境地。他们累得筋疲力尽，生活几无保障，年纪轻轻就命丧黄泉。在西方，在大众传媒和读写普及之前，最强大的大众媒介是教堂，它提醒信徒们，他们的灵魂处于危险之中，他们总有一天会成为蛆虫的食物。他们对此已十分了然，无须其艺术再表现这种失落感。
今天，你们普通西方人面对的信息轰炸不是宗教的，而是商业的，而且让人快乐得无法忍受。除了那位在贷款生意上一直输于Ｄｉｔｅｃｈ的银行家，快餐食客、新闻主播、发短信的人，都在微笑、微笑、微笑。我们的杂志突出刊登满面春风的名人和美满幸福的家庭。（托尔斯泰显然没有编辑过家居杂志。）由于这样的信息都有一项任务——即从我们的口袋里撬走钱包——所以它们使“幸福”的概念本身显得虚假。“欢庆吧！”宣传关节炎良药西乐葆的广告这样命令道，随后我们却发现它能增加心脏病的发病率。
这种不断驱使人们追求快乐的做法使人筋疲力尽。如果你还不微笑——在我们制造了所有这些奇妙的药片，制定了那些精彩的手机方案之后！——那你是出了什么毛病吧？不笑就不是美国人。在一大群游客中你能辨认出那些美国人，他们总是出于本能地咧着嘴笑。美国把追求幸福的权利庄严地载入了其建国文献中。所以我们追求幸福，而且——至少像商业所定义的那样——我们抓到了幸福。
可是，我们像一条追逐轿车的狗一样，最后赶上了轿车却不知道如何是好。我们隐约感到不满足，尽管已经有了应该要的；我们因有这种欲望而隐约感到愧疚；因为得到的并非广告所宣传的而隐约感到愤怒。上个月有份调查说，女人做爱或看电视要比陪自己的孩子玩耍更快乐，人们对此啧啧不满。为什么她们就不该那样呢？这就是市场给幸福下定义的方法。幸福就是感觉好。孩子们，那些生活在广告之外的孩子们，使你感觉不好——疲惫、受挫、烦恼、贫穷。然后，他们离开，让你伤透了心。
我们所忘记的——我们的经济指望我们忘却的——是：幸福远不止是没有痛苦的快乐。带来最大快乐的东西也带有最有可能降临的损失和失望。今天，我们的周围充斥着轻易得来的幸福的许诺，我们需要有人对我们说，不幸福也没什么，忧愁能使幸福更深刻。正如品酒影片《杯酒人生》所告诉我们的，正是腐死之吻使葡萄汁变成了黑比诺葡萄酒。我们需要艺术来告诉我们，正如宗教曾经告诉过我们的，记得你终将死亡，一切都会结束，幸福不会因否定这一点而到来，只能对其加以接受。这一启示甚至比叶子烟还要苦，但却不知怎么地带来了一股清新的气息。 |
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