HAPPY JOY JOY
What is the secret to happiness? Maybe it’s not about you, as artist Stefan Sagmeister found out.
What, I asked Stefan Sagmeister, is the secret to happiness?
Of all people in the world, he should know. He’s the creator and designer of The Happy Show, an exhibition based on 10 years of research into happiness — his own and everyone else’s.
Sagmeister was on the phone from New York where he lives and works. After the question, he paused. It sounded like he was really thinking about his answer.
“I have a friend on Bowen Island,” he said. “She told me that maybe the secret of happiness is to stop worrying about my own and worry about the happiness of others instead.”
Sagmeister is originally from Austria where, he said, talk of happiness is seen by many as “stupid or American or possibly both.” So he was quick to recognize how his words might be dismissed by the ironic and intelligent as the kind of thing you’d read on a cheap greeting card.
“I know that sounds like a bromide,” he said. “There is good research out there that people who help out other people are better off than the people who are being helped. It’s not quite as silly as it sounds.”
Sagmeister’s exhibition opens today at the Museum of Vancouver.
The Happy Show has become, much to Sagmeister’s surprise, a big hit around the world. It started a little more than three years ago when the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia asked his firm, Sagmeister & Walsh, to design an exhibition based on its work.
Sagmeister & Walsh was asked because of its track record, which includes designing album covers for The Rolling Stones and Lou Reed and advertising campaigns for corporate clients such as HBO and Levi’s. Among its awards are two Grammy Awards: one for a Talking Heads album and the second for a special package designs for David Byrne and Brian Eno.
“It just didn’t seem that interesting,” Sagmeister said about organizing another design show, “mostly because we had done it before. So we thought: ‘Couldn’t we do something along the line of happiness?’ ”
It was supposed to be a one-off exhibition. But so far, it’s been seen by more than 250,000 people in Toronto, Los Angeles, Chicago and Paris. After Vancouver it goes to Vienna, where Sagmeister studied graphic design.
The Happy Show mixes film, interactive displays and infographics. Its displays include a stationary bike that the rider pedals to activate a wall of neon text and gumball machines that indicate viewers’ levels of happiness.
The exhibition tells the story of Sagmeister’s personal experiments in happiness. They include three stints of three months each mediating in Bali, taking antidepressants and undergoing cognitive therapy. Is it possible, he wonders, to train the mind to be happy the way we train the body to be fit?
The Happy Show is also based on extensive research condensed from dozens of books and interviews with numerous psychologists. A big influence, he said, was Marty Seligman, the U.S. psychologist whose groundbreaking work started the positive psychology movement.
He believes the Happy Show has struck a nerve with people who are searching for their own way to find happiness. He also pointed out that visitors stay in the exhibition five times longer than traditional museum shows.
“It’s a subject that clearly many people are interested in,” he said. “We’ve designed the show so that you can walk through it and pick and choose and see something in 15 minutes. If those 15 minutes seem interesting, you can easily stay three hours.”
Sagmeister will be coming to Vancouver to write the type on the wall for the exhibition. He said he loves seeing the way people respond to what he’s created.
And that, he said, has made him happy.
“We have really got sincere feedback: hundreds of emails and thousands of drawings,” he said.
“That’s always been a very joyous exercise.”