Jesus never framed

One way you can tell that a work of art is "modern" is by noticing it has no frame around it.

Or at least it tries not to have a frame.

By the late 1800s and into the 20th century, art in the West began to free itself from frames. For example, Marcel Duchamp famously attached a bicycle wheel to a stool -- and it became a work of art. Or: he signed a urinal and ... presto: a work of art.

These objects have no frames around them.

Framing something is too sentimental. It is as if you, Mr. or Ms. Artist, are saying by your framed art that there is an idealized world of perfect resolution within that frame -- and you know there isn't.

Symphonies should not resolve in final, harmonious chords. That would be framing them unrealistically.

Poems don't need to rhyme. That would presume a world of perfect order underneath the mess on the surface of things -- all you need is to stitch harmony together in little meanings.

And so on.

Jesus never framed.

Logos2Go

John 6.15 Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself.

Luke 4.28-30 And rose up, and thrust him out of the city, and led him unto the brow of the hill whereon their city was built, that they might cast him down headlong. But he passing through the midst of them went his way ...

"... in other words, the sentimentalist appears to be moved by something or someone beyond themselves but is to a large extent, perhaps primarily, concerned with the satisfaction gained in exercising emotion. (It is worth adding that part of this satisfaction comes from knowing the impression the emotion makes on others. We like others to realize that we are compassionate, tender and so forth. And even if others are not around, there can be something deeply gratifying about exercising feelings that most would admire). ... We only need think of the friend who flatters us ceaselessly, regardless of our glaring faults, enjoying the pleasure it affords, or the obsessive counselor, often found in churches, waiting to descend on someone in crisis in order to feed on their own emotional "need to be needed." Inasmuch as sentimentality is directed at other people, the other person becomes a means to an end -- he or she is absorbed into the subjectivity of the sentimentalist. The sentimentalist loves and hates, grieves or pities not for the sake of the other but for the sake of enjoying love, hate, grief or pity ..." From Jeremy S. Begbie, "Beauty, Sentimentality and the Arts" in The Beauty of God: Theology and the Arts, ed. Daniel J. Treier, Mark Husbands and Roger Lundin (Downers Grove, Ill: Intervarsity Press, 2007), 51.