根据以下资料回答：　　Many things make people think artists are weird

单选题 根据以下资料回答：
　　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．Bittersweetuess?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 Wash’t always s0．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 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 reason, in fact, may be just the opposite: there is too much happiness in the world today.
　　Aiter all, what i.~ the one modem form of expression almost completely dedicated to depicting happiness? Advertising. The rige 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 goad to joy. If you're not smiling~aiter 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 happierwatching 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 andpoor. 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 sanspain. 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 connoisseur movie Sideways tells us, it is the kiss of decay and mortality thatmakes grape juice into Pinot Noir. We need art to tell us: remember that you will die, that everything ends, and thathappiness 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

参考答案D

解析:

第一段指出艺术家唯一的工作就是探讨各种情感，他们却选择把焦点放在情感糟糕的人身上。第二段到第四段指出最早的艺术形式，如绘画和音乐，是最适于表达快乐的。但到了19世纪的某个阶段，越来越多的艺术家开始视快乐为乏味的、虚假的，或者糟糕的。有人认为艺术之所以越来越怀疑快乐是因为现代社会正历经苦难，而事实上，真正的原因可能恰恰相反：现今的世界有太多的快乐了。
第五段指出反快乐艺术的兴起与大众传媒几乎同步出现，随着大众传媒出现，兴起了一种商业文化。
第六段和第七段指出在西方，在大众传媒和文化普及之前，最强大的传播媒介是教堂，而今天，西方人面对的信息轰炸不是宗教的，而是商业的。
第八段指出这种不断驱使A-41G追求快乐的做法使人筋疲力尽。
第九段指出我们有时会隐约感到不满足，尽管已经有了应得的；我们因有这种欲望而隐约感到愧疚；因得到的并非广告所宣传的而隐约感到愤怒。
最后一段指出我们所忽略的是：幸福远不止是没有痛苦的快乐。带来最大快乐的事物也最有可能伴随着损失和失望。
试题解析
D。本题的出题点在转折处(yet)。第一段第二句指出，艺术家唯一的工作就是探讨各种情感，他们却选择把焦点放在情感糟糕的人身上。第一段段末又说，伟大的艺术从来不描写单纯而不带讥讽的快乐，故选D。

点击查看答案进入在线模考

你可能喜欢

单选题 "Wordsworth's daffodils" in the second paragraph refers to

A．one of Wordsworth's poems
B．a kind of flower that Wordsworth liked
C．art about happiness
D．art's inner controversy

点击查看答案进入在线模考

单选题 The tone of the author in the last but one paragraph is

A．ironic
B．approving
C．indifferent
D．exaggerated

点击查看答案进入在线模考

单选题 It can be concluded from the last paragraph that __

A．true happiness has within itself elements of bitterness
B．tree happiness does not exist
C．no one needs true happiness
D．no one can get true happiness

点击查看答案进入在线模考

hot热门搜索

你可能喜欢

延伸阅读