2006年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 your average Westerner is bombarded with are not religious but commercial, and forever happy .Fast-food eaters, news anchors, text messengers, all 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 to 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.

What we forget--what our economy depends on is 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.

38. In the author's opinion, advertising
[A] emerges in the wake of the anti-happy part.
[B] is a cause of disappointment for the general peer
[C] replace the church as a major source of information
[D] creates an illusion of happiness rather than happiness itself.

[答案] D

[解題思路]

本題在文章中的對應信息為第四段和第六段。第四段最后一句話提出廣告和大眾文化所描述的幸福更是一種"ideology"，一種意識形態，ideology在這里可以等同于D選項中的illusion（幻覺）。第六段也指出了這種幸福感非常"unreliable"，很不可靠，因為它只是一種幻想，因此D為正確選項。A選項中"in the wake of"是"在......之后"的意思，但卻顛倒了前后順序，應該是反幸福藝術隨著廣告的出現而出現，文章在第四段中有對應信息"The rise of anti-happy art almost exactly tracks the emergence of mass media"，因此A選項錯誤。B與文章意思相反，因為廣告給人們創造了幸福感。

[題目譯文]

作者認為廣告
[A] 是隨著反幸福藝術而出現的
[B] 是大眾感到失望的一個原因
[C] 作為一種主要信息來源而取代了教堂
[D] 創造出了一種幸福的幻覺，而不是幸福本身