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①Many things make people think artists are weird. ②But the weirdest may be this: artists only job is to explore emotions, and yet they choose to focus on the ones that feel bad. ①This wasnt always so. ②The earliest forms of art, like painting and music, are those best suited for expressing joy. ③[1]But somewhere from the 19th century onward, more artists began seeing happiness as meaningless, phony or, worst of all, boring, as we went from Wordsworths daffodils to Baudelaires flowers of evil. ①You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness because modern times have seen so much misery. ②But its not as if earlier times didnt know perpetual war, disaster and the massacre of innocents. ③The reason, in fact, may be just the opposite: there is too much damn happiness in the world today. ①After all, what is the one modern form of expression almost completely dedicated to depicting happiness? ② Advertising. ③[3]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 | 
