the happiness in unhappiness

Why are creative types skeptical of joy? Because somebody has to be!

Many things make people think artistic-types are weird - the late nights, the nonconformity, the cigarettes, but the weirdest must be the unwavering focus on the emotions that make us feel lousy. Art today can give you angst, definitely. Anomie? No problem. Bittersweetness? You got it. Tristesse? What size do 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. We went from Wordsworth's daffodils to Baudelaire's flowers of evil. By the the 20th century, loud music became more atonal, and visual art more unsettling.

Sure, there have been exceptions, but it would not be a stretch to say that for the past century or so, serious art has been at war with happiness. 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, there is one 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. Today the messages your average Westerner is bombarded with are all relentlessly happy. Fast-food eaters, news anchors, text messengers, all smiling, smiling, smiling, except for that guy who has to take painful insulin injections every night as his dog watches!

It gets exhausting, this constant goad 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. But 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, feel vaguely guilty for wanting it, feel vaguely angry because it didn't come as advertised. People tsk-tsked over last month's study in which women reported being happier having sex or watching 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 and poor. Then they move away and break your heart.

What we forget is that happiness is more than pleasure sans pain. Things that bring the greatest joy carry the greatest potential for disappointment. We need someone to tell us that it is okay not to be happy, that sadness makes happiness deeper. We need art to tell us, as religion once did, "memento mori" - remember that you will die, everything ends, and that happiness comes not in denying this but in living with it.

This is adapted from an article by James Poniewozik, in the January 17th issue of TIME, called 'The Art of Unhappiness'.