The Art of News; The News of Art

Hans Haacke's “News” (1969-2008) at the New Museum.

It’s a bit disconcerting to watch a facsimile of your industry being performed in a museum. Look at these pretend newsroom producers, reënacting the ancient art of print production! It’s a bit like surveying those painstakingly constructed dioramas at the Museum of Natural History that illustrate the lifestyle of some long-dead civilization. Only, in this case, the subject is you.

The New Museum’s fall exhibit, “The Last Newspaper,” doesn’t so much comment on the impending death of print news as envision a world in which print has long been dead; the only purpose it serves is to be repurposed as art. The mere concept of recording news on paper is treated as a quaint novelty: You can cut it up and make your own headlines, for example, because it’s an actual physical object. If you’re lucky, you might catch the revival of William Pope.L’s “Eating the Wall Street Journal,” in which actors wearing Obama masks ingest pages of Rupert Murdoch’s trophy newspaper. (Try doing that to a blog post.) Another piece, Hans Haacke’s “News,” goes a step further by highlighting the transience of live news from any source. It’s actually an update of a 1969 work, which featured a printer endlessly spitting out live updates from wire services; now its content comes from RSS feeds. Its primary theme seems to be the ephemeral nature of news. A secondary theme could be: Who has the patience to read all this stuff?

If nothing else, “The Last Newspaper” brings out the widespread existential angst surrounding the nation’s print publications. There’s definitely something strange about reading a review of the exhibit on the Web site of the New York Times, whose iconic logo is featured prominently throughout the show. Visiting the exhibit might feel to some employees of that paper like attending their own mass funeral. Like one of its featured pieces, though, “The Last Newspaper” has published the obituary before the actual demise. No one doubts that the end is coming; the biggest problem is that without the benefit of hindsight, it’s hard to say what it all means.