The October 2021 Focus for Reframed is Ghoulish
Horror and death in entertainment shows have captivated millions of Americans in the last decade, from Netflix’s most-binged series in 2018, The Haunting of Hill House, and its more recent Midnight Mass, to podcasts including Crime Junkie and Anatomy of Murder.
Why are we so haunted by horror?
Art News
Saints canonized by the Catholic Church come mostly from two major categories: those who lived with or were martyred for Jesus Christ, and those in the centuries since whom performed miracles. Regardless of one’s religious beliefs, many of these saints’ stories are rooted in faith more than fact.
In 1988, artist Lynn Hershman Leeson told an interviewer to “imagine a world in which there is a blurring between the soul and the chip.” That mental blur—and the ways in our internet lives, and especially internet vernacular, is subtly interwoven into our actual lives—is a theme of Reality Ender, painter Avery Singer’s first New York show, on view at Hauser & Wirth through October 30, 2021.
This self-portrait, exhibited in Paris in 1895, came with a caption from an unnamed male art critic noting that “this woman” often had critics assume the work had been painted by a man, because no woman would have been capable of this quality of painting.
In the U.S. Capitol, amidst the statues of controversial politicians and military figures that protestors stormed past in January, stand several statues of quiet American heroes and heroines who are testaments to our country’s ability to change for the better.
In the special collection of brittle works on paper at the Boston Athenaeum lies Paul Revere’s 1770 hand-colored engraving, The Bloody Massacre.
The July 2021 Focus for Reframed is American Heat
In the original 1957 lyrics to the song “America” from the Broadway musical West Side Story, Puerto Rican immigrants dance across a rooftop in the stifling heat of smog-filled Manhattan. “Immigrant goes to America, many ‘hellos’ in America, nobody knows in America,” the women sing.
At what point can an object become art? The opinion that the original "Star-Spangled Banner" is now a work of art is the tried and true view of this "Art & Object" columnist.
Dürer was only thirty or thirty-one when he completed the work. Dying at age fifty-six, he prolifically completed over 300 prints, 1000 delicate drawings, and 100 paintings for which twenty-first-century scholars can account.
Eagles and George Washington have for centuries been mainstream symbols of the United States, and the nation’s unique contributions to science, culture, and the stalwart pursuit of truth.
