Art history in streaming television fiction: Painting and sculpture as narrative devices

OpenAlex · English

This article examines how paintings and sculptures function as narrative devices in streaming television fiction. Focusing on The White Lotus season 2, Severance season 1, and Gold Diggers (or Russian Affairs) season 1, the study analyzes how artworks help organize atmosphere, symbolism, dramatic progression, and ideological critique within serial television narratives. Methodologically, the article combines qualitative visual discourse analysis, descriptive scene analysis, and iconographic interpretation informed by Panofsky’s approach to symbolic meaning. Rather than treating artworks as neutral set decoration, the study argues that they operate as active elements of mise-en-scène that guide interpretation, structure affect, and intensify thematic meaning. The comparison demonstrates that art objects do not perform a single stable role across the three series. In The White Lotus, paintings, sculptures, and Sicilian folklore objects function as allegorical mirrors of desire, betrayal, class satire, and gendered violence. In Severance, paintings become instruments of corporate myth, institutional memory, and ideological control within the closed symbolic universe of Lumon Industries. In Gold Diggers, art is tied to prestige, aspiration, cultural capital, and exclusion in the elite social world of Moscow. By proposing an analytical matrix structured around aesthetic, symbolic, dramatic, and ideological functions, the article offers a comparative framework for studying the role of art-historical imagery in contemporary streaming television. It therefore contributes to current debates on television aesthetics, visual culture, and serial narration by showing how artworks function not as decorative supplements but as structuring devices of narrative meaning. At the same time, the article argues that comparing three culturally distinct cases makes it possible to identify both shared narrative strategies and context-specific variations in the use of visual art. In this respect, the study positions art history as an important analytical resource for understanding contemporary screen storytelling.