“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”
Jean Baudrillard and the New Museum seem to be on the same wavelength conerning contemporary culture. In the 86, 400 seconds that make up one day, how many 30-second increments of informational exposure does an individual experience? Our relation to the world beyond ourselves is often comprised of capitalized 
headliners and allusive photographs; a gestalt phantasmagoria that often turns communication into a mad-libs exercise rather than a vicarious experience of the experiential spectrum that defies physics. A single day in the cosmopolitan stratum of sociality tends to look like a Google Image Search, bearing an eclectic array of images that represent our influx experience; our memory recall patterned “with quotations and…ellipses.” The New Museum’s current exhibition “The Last Newspaper” vies with the myriad of media kineses to bring this fact to the fore of our mind. Holland Cotter of The New York Times writes, in more than errant phraseology, about the exhibit’s agenda of communiqué:
“The idea behind the exhibition — print journalism as a visual and existential phenomenon — is timely, and specific enough to be addressed and illustrated through art. Is the phenomenon intrinsically ephemeral or monumental? Is it truth telling or illusion spinning? One asks the same questions of art.
One also asks: Who has the power to write the news, or make art, and by extension to create something called history? What are the similarities between newspapers and museums? To what degree are both responsible for providing social information as well as entertainment?
If the show does nothing else, it demonstrates how widely and variously newspapers have served as raw material for contemporary art, old and new. Two very different works from 1967 are the earliest here. And they 
point up the contradictions inherent in a medium that is all about “on the record” and about constant change.
An installation by the conceptual artist Luciano Fabro (1936-2007) consists of several open newspaper pages placed side by side on the gallery floor. Every day the pages are picked up, the floor is washed, and different pages, always from a day-old edition of a local paper, are laid down. This pattern is repeated daily for the duration of the show. The simple gesture was inspired by a domestic routine practiced by Italian housewives. In that gesture, as in Mr. Fabro’s art, news is incidental, disposable, gone.”
For more information on the specific projects that will span the durarion of the exhibit (October 6, 2010-January 9,2011), visit the New Museum’s site directly or stop in for The New York Times’s review.
