Text 4
Many things make people think artists are weird and the weirdest may be this: artists’ only job is to explore emotions, and yet they 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 somewhere in the 19th century, more artists began seeing happiness as insipid, phony or, worst of all, boring as we went from Wordsworth’s daffodils to Baudelaire’s flowers of evil.
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 until exhausted, 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. Given all this, they did not exactly need their art to be a bummer too.
Today the messages the average Westerner is surrounded with are not religious but commercial, and forever happy. Fast-food eaters, news anchors, text messengers, all smiling, smiling, smiling. Our magazines feature beaming celebrities and happy families in perfect homes. And since these messages have an agenda -- to lure us to open our wallets -- they make the very idea of happiness seem 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 depends on us forgetting -- is that happiness is more than pleasure without 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 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.
36. By citing the example of poets Wordsworth and Baudelaire, the author intends to show that ________.
[A] poetry is not as expressive of joy as painting or music
[B] art grow out of both positive and negative feeling
[C] poets today are less skeptical of happiness
[D] artists have changed their focus of interest
第1题
视角的定义为:()。
A.眼外注视点和角膜前极连线与光轴所成角
B.外界物体两端在眼内结点处所形成的夹角
C.外界物体两端在眼内回旋点处所形成的夹角
D.眼外注视点和眼内主点连线与光轴所成角
第3题
A.像与结点的距离不变
B.物与主点的距离不变
C.对所视物体如果视角相同则视网膜成像大小也相同
D.视角随距改变可自行调整
第5题
A.同一物体形成的视角与距离成反比
B.同一距离,物体大,形成的视角就大
C.视角为1分时,视力为1.0
D.视锥细胞直径越小,视力越好
E.视锥细胞直径越大,视力越好
第6题
A.胸骨角
B.肋腰点
C.肩胛下角
D.肋弓
E.胸骨下角
两侧肋弓在胸骨下端汇合处所形成的夹角为()。
为了保护您的账号安全,请在“上学吧”公众号进行验证,点击“官网服务”-“账号验证”后输入验证码“”完成验证,验证成功后方可继续查看答案!