单选题 Many things make people think artists are weird—the odd hours, the nonconformity, the clove cigarettes. However, the weirdest may be this: artists' only jobs are to explore emotions, and yet they choose to focus on the ones that feel lousy. 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(上标) century, more artists began seeing happiness as insipid, phony or, worst of all, boring. In the 20th(上标) century, classical music became more atonal, 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. In 1824, Beethoven completed his "Ode to Joy". In 1962, novelist Anthoy Burgess used it in A Clockwork Orange as the favorite music of his ultra-violent antihero.
You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness because modern times have seen such misery. But the reason may actually be just the opposite: there is too much damn happiness in the world today.
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. Today the messages that the average Westerner is bombarded with are not religious but commercial, and relentlessly happy. Since these messages have an agenda—to prey our wallets from our pockets—they make the very idea of happiness seem bogus(假的). "Celebrate!" commanded the ads for the arthritis drug Celebrex, before we found out it could increase the risk of heart attack.
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 someone to tell us that it is OK not to be happy, that sadness makes happiness deeper. As the wine-connoisseur movie Sideways tells us, it is the kiss of decay and mortality that makes grape juice into Pinot Norway need art to tell us, as religion once did, 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, is a breath of fresh air.

【正确答案】 C

【答案解析】[解析] 本题是一道例证题，我们知道，给出一个例子的目的不是说明一个事实，而是通过这个例子来说明某种观点。“欢乐颂”出现的第2段只有一句话，第1句就是本段的观点：严肃艺术与欢乐的感觉格格不入。接下来用伯格斯的小说这个实例来说明这个观点。回答例证题的关键是能否找到例子说明的观点或者支持此观点的例子，而非能否看懂例子本身。故选C项。