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Last Chance Exhibits
The New Museum’s Last Newspaper and Cooper Hewitt’s Why Design Now?
Cooper Hewitt – National Design Triennial: Why Design Now?
There’s a couple of not-to-be-missed museum exhibits closing this week that we highly suggest attending by this weekend.
New Museum’s – Last Newspaper Exhibit
At the turn of the twentieth century, in the dawn of the machine age, newspapers were everywhere and wire services were feeding their hunger for the latest information. In their rush to embrace the future, the Cubists discovered a rich artistic medium: the newspaper. The Surrealists followed suit, and by World War I newspapers had become an accepted material integrated with painting, collage, and graphic design. By the 1960s—when this exhibition’s chronology begins—the use of the newspaper in fine art was no longer a novelty; it had become a standard source for both images and language.
The artists in this exhibition continue the exploration of the newspaper, but their focus lies in the ideological rather than the purely physical properties of the daily press. They use the newspaper as a platform to address issues of hierarchy, attribution, contextualization, and editorial bias. By disassembling and recontextualizing elements of the newspaper, such as the construction of graphics and text, the artists on view take charge of and remake the flow of information that defines our perception of the world. At its simplest, the artistic impulse that largely informs this exhibition is one of reaction and appropriation; the newspaper provides a stimulus and is itself incorporated into the final artwork. www.newmuseum.org/
Cooper Hewitt – National Design Triennial: Why Design Now?
Why Design Now? is the fourth installation in the National Design Triennial exhibition series launched by Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in 2000. The Triennial provides a sample of contemporary innovation, looking at what progressive designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, and citizens are doing in diverse fields and at different scales around the world. Included are practical solutions already in use as well as experimental ideas designed to inspire further research. A few projects will provoke controversy, answering some questions while raising others. Each one—from a soil-powered table lamp to a post-petroleum urban utopia—celebrates the transformative power of design.