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  3. Many things make people think artists are weird. But the weirdest may be this: artists’ only job is to explore emotions, and yet

Many things make people think artists are weird. But the weirdest may be this: artists’ only job is to explore emotions, and yet

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问题    Many things make people think artists are weird. But 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 from 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’ s flowers of evil.
   You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness because modern times have seen so much 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 danger 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 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.
By citing the examples of poets Wordsworth and Baudelaire, the author intends to show that
选项 A、poetry is not as expressive of joy as painting or music.
B、art grows out of both positive and negative feelings.
C、poets today are less skeptical of happiness.
D、artists have changed their focus of interest.
答案D
解析 推断题。第一段第二句指出，艺术家最怪异的方面就是：他们将焦点投向负面的情感。第 二段一、二句指出事实并非一直这样，最早的艺术形式是最适合表达快乐的。第三句指出，但是 19世纪越来越多的艺术家开始贬低快乐：从华兹华斯的《水仙花》转向波德莱尔的《恶之花》。 显然，作者用这两个例子来说明艺术家们已改变其关注的情感。因此D项正确。A项不合适的 原因是文中没有将诗歌、绘画和音乐对于快乐的表现力进行比较。B项从字面上来看，似乎是有 道理的，但是这不是作者引用二人的目的所在，因为作者强调的是一个重点的转移。C项的说 法和第三段第一句的意思相反。
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