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 "pep". 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 ultra-violent 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 modem 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 mason, in fact, may be just the opposite: there is too much happiness in the world today. After all, what is the one modem 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, are 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 road 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 watching TV than playing with their kids. But why shouldn’t they.’ This is how tile 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 Joss and disappointment. Today, surrounded by promises of easy happiness, we need someone to tell us that it is OK 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: 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. According to the passage, great art describes all of the following EXCEPT______.
A. nonconformity
B. depression
C. bitterness
D. total happiness
Students of United States history, seeking to identify the circumstances that encouraged the emergence of feminist movements, have thoroughly investigated the mid-nineteenth-century American economic and social conditions that affected the status of women. These historians, however, have analyzed less fully the development of specifically feminist ideas and activities during the same period. Furthermore, the ideological origins of feminism in the United States have been obscured because, even when historians did take into account those feminist ideas and activities occurring within the United States, they failed to recognize that feminism was then a truly international movement actually centered in Europe. American feminist activists who have been described as "solitary" and "individual theorists" were in reality connected to a movement — utopian socialism — which was already popularizing feminist ideas in Europe during the two decades that culminated in the first women’s rights conference held at Seneca Falls, New York, in 180o8. Thus, a complete understanding of the origins and development of nineteenth-century feminism in the United States requires that the geographical focus be widened to include Europe and that the detailed study already made of social conditions be expanded to include the ideological development of feminism. The earliest and most popular of the utopian socialists were the Saint-Simonians. The specifically feminist part of Saint-Simonianism has, however, been less studied than the group’s contribution to early socialism. This is regrettable on two counts. By 1832 feminism was the central concern of Saint- Simonianism and entirely absorbed its adherents’ energy. Hence, by ignoring its feminism, European historians have misunderstood Saint- Simonianism. Moreover, since many feminist ideas can be traced to Saint- Simonianism, European historians’ appreciation of later feminism in France and the United States remained limited. Saint-Simon’s followers, many of whom were women, based their feminism on an interpretation of his project to reorganize the globe by replacing brute force with the rule of spiritual powers. The new world order would be ruled together by a male, to represent reflection, and a female, to represent sentiment. This complementarity reflects the fact that, while the Saint-Simonians did not reject the belief that there were innate differences between men and women, they nevertheless foresaw an equally important social and political role for both sexes in their Utopia. Only a few Saint-Simonians opposed a definition of sexual equality based on gender distinction. This minority believed that individuals of both sexes were born similar in capacity and character, and they ascribed male-female differences to socialization and education. The envisioned result of both currents of thought, however, was that women would enter public life in the new age and that sexual equality would reward men as well as women with an improved way of life. What did historians studying American feminist movements manage to do
A. Study influential economic and social conditions.
B. Identify the origin of feminist movements.
C. Fully analyze the development of feminist ideas.
D. Realize the international origins of the 19th century American feminist thought.