hollyr.eth

Framedl 2026-10-18 1/6* Max Ernst painted "The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child before Three Witnesses: André Breton, Paul Éluard, and the Painter" in 1926. The Virgin is smacking the unruly baby Jesus as three Surrealists watch through the window. The hostile act against Jesus (and Christianity) was not expressed in the faces of the witnesses, perhaps accentuating the Surrealist dreamlike quality of the absurd tableau. But it did get a hostile reaction when shown in Cologne later that year, when Archbishop Karl Joseph Schulte of Cologne ordered it removed and had the exhibition shut down. smacks: @frdysk @cryptoconsuela @ogerpon.eth

Framedl 2026-10-17 1/6* A puzzle in the strong force would goad physicists into proposing a new, nearly invisible particle to solve it. Frank Wilczek named it after a laundry detergent, because it cleaned up the mess. It's still a leading guess for dark matter, the unseen stuff that outweighs ordinary matter roughly five to one. Nobody has caught one. Cornelia Parker had the British Army blow up a garden shed, full of objects from friends or car boot sales, then hung the pieces around a single lightbulb: 'Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View.' A universe paused mid-blast, the space between the objects is what interested her. Like the physicists, she was drawn more to what's invisible. Splinters: @croth.eth @ogerpon.eth @frydsk

Framedl 2026-10-16 1/6* Veronese painted the Last Supper as a Venetian party with silks, German soldiers, a jester, dwarves, and a dog. It was first-century Jerusalem, gloriously anachronistic. The Inquisition demanded changes. In particular, they wanted Mary Magdalene in place of the dog. Paolo told them, 'We painters take the same liberties as poets and madmen.' Instead of cutting a single figure, he decided to cut the title. He renamed it the 'Feast in the House of Levi', and every guest could stay. Hint: @ogerpon.eth

Framedl 2026-10-15 1/6* June 1789: locked out of their meeting hall, the Third Estate took refuge in a tennis court at Versailles and pledged not to disperse until France had a constitution of its own making. A sports hall turned asylum for a nation. One deputy refused the oath, and sat with his arms crossed. David set out to paint it and gave up; the Revolution kept condemning the men in it. Today this place changed hands, and we're asked to accept a new social contract or go read-only. Worth reading the terms closely before we pledge anything. Hint: @sub

Framedl 2026-10-14 2/6* In 1586, Domenico Fontana moved the Vatican obelisk, over 330 tons of granite, with dozens of capstans, hundreds of men and horses heaving in unison. The pope ordered silence on pain of death. As it rose, the ropes started to smoke. A sailor shouted, 'Acqua alle funi!' They held. He was rewarded, the story goes, with the right for his family to supply Rome's Palm Sunday palms. Plenty of unctuous voices at that court. The one worth hearing broke the rules. Shout-out: @sub @ogerpon.eth

Framedl 2026-10-13 1/6* Gustave Courbet painted a small-town funeral more than six metres wide, a size that the Academy kept for gods and battles. Fifty-odd real neighbors from Ornans posed one by one: mourners weeping into handkerchiefs, red-nosed beadles who'd rather be at the tavern, and a dog that wandered in. Every temperament in the village, gathered around one open grave. Critics called it ugly and trivial. Courbet called it the burial of Romanticism. Intimations: @frdysk @sub

Framedl 2026-10-12 1/6* In 1969, Mierle Laderman Ukeles declared maintenance itself to be art: scrubbing and sweeping, the endless upkeep nobody applauds. In 1973, she washed a museum's steps on her knees, as the show. Then she joined the NYC Sanitation Department as its unpaid artist-in-residence and shook hands with all 8,500 workers, one by one: 'Thank you for keeping New York City alive.' Her piece for Freshkills Park, the old Staten Island landfill, is due to be completed in 2036. A 62-foot overlook juts out from the mounds, and it's only possible because it sits on a slope where garbage was never dumped. Everywhere else on 2,200 acres is sealed under a cap; here alone, the supports reach bedrock. From the end you look down on wetlands that were never filled, and out across a mountain of refuse being remade as a park. A summit you can stand on because of what didn't happen there. Hint: @frdysk

Framedl 2026-10-11 1/6* Watteau's Pierrot, around 1718: a life-size clown in white satin, arms limp, staring straight out. Behind him his troupe goes on cavorting, the Doctor on a donkey, the rest mid-joke. Generations have seen him as morose, the lonely sad clown. Art historian Donald Posner argues that's our invention: the melancholy Pierrot is a 19th-century persona. In Watteau's day he was a simpleton, the butt of the joke, not a man given to brooding.

Framedl 2026-10-10 1/6* A vacuous truth is a statement that holds because there's nothing inside it to make it false. Ex falso is the underlying principle for this lean proof: -- "Every unicorn in this room is purple." example (Unicorn : Type) [IsEmpty Unicorn] (Purple : Unicorn → Prop) : ∀ u : Unicorn, Purple u := fun u => isEmptyElim u Robert Rauschenberg's White Paintings, 1951: panels rolled flat with white house paint. Critics called them empty. John Cage called them 'airports for the lights, shadows and particles' and wrote 4′33″, his silent piece, partly in response. Nod: @ogerpon.eth

Framedl 2026-10-08 2/6* Edward Hopper finished painting 'Nighthawks' in January 1942, weeks after Pearl Harbor, while American cities practiced blackout drills. An all-night counter blazing on a dark corner, the four "nighthawks" under fluorescent light, no one speaking. Look for the entrance. There isn't one visible from the street. Hopper said he "didn't see it as particularly lonely", but then admitted that, "unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city". The artist resisted the lugubrious reading; the rest of us never have. One became two from @frdysk's "hint"