HAPPY [new year]
How do we know that it is going to be in fact happy? Perhaps happiness is too personal to be described or even measured. In any case The Economist brilliantly ended 2006 with an article that looks at happiness (and how to measure it) through the lens of economics.
Economists have an infinite number of tools to tackle a particular challenge. In the quest for measuring happiness the article walks us through the most scientific ones such as brain scans and face recognition to the more straightforward as a simple survey. The result so far is foggy with no apparent winner and the tragic (but very real) conclusion that it is all relative. Our happiness seems to be directly related to our neighbor’s unhappiness, “Doing well is not enough: we also want to do better than our peers. This status anxiety runs deep.”
Maybe economists need to stop looking inwards and do what they do best which is precisely the opposite. As the article openly acknowledges, economists’ forte is studying “outward behavior, not inward feelings; choices made, not pleasures taken.” And it is precisely a change of paradigm that is motivating new research on feelings. Well, feelings are not necessarily the domain of individuals as much as they are not confined to the depths of our hearts. Media Studies has been telling us for a while that we can also interpret feelings from people’s expressions, from art.
Marshal McLuhan once wrote in one of those essays that at the moment fell through the cracks, that artists are the one group of individuals that inhabit the present (which is regarded as the future by society at large) and their role is not merely limited to their own self-expression but is a reflection of the larger community as it also helps the community to understand themselves as well as the technology (or environment) that surrounds them.
If this is even close to be true then street art as well as Sonia Katyal's Semiotic Disobedience (see more about the latter in previous posts), offer a non-pretentious form of expression that is extremely intimate at the community level and perhaps can tell us more about our feelings than isolated individual opinions. Artists can be catalysts for the rest of us; sometimes they can accurately represent us. Street art with its irreverence has the potential of becoming a powerful medium to express and analyze feelings beyond the stiff limitations of scientific research.
Here are a few examples taken directly from the streets of New York City during the last day of 2006.
Have a happy new year anyway.
Billboard in Nolita, Manhattan
Poster in Nolita, Manhattan
Decorating Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Luxury Condo Construction Site in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Bus Stop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn
Empty Lot in Williamsburg, Brooklyn