A Case Study in Finding an Appropriate TV Newswoman (A CBS Docudrama in Words and Pictures), 1984. Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006 ). Silver-dye bleach prints. Frame: 112,4 x 108 cm (44 ¼ x 42 ½ in.). Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Partial Purchase through The Board of Overseers Acquisition Fund and Partial Gift of Marc Selwyn © The Robert Heinecken Trust. EX.2017.4.3.6
Breaking News: Turning the Lens on Mass Media ‘Breaking News: Turning the Lens on Mass Media’, on view December 20, 2016 – April 30, 2017 at the Getty Museum, explores how artists have responded to the media’s coverage of topics ranging from local stories to international politics and military conflict.]]>
Source: J. Paul Getty Museum
Photographs have helped shape people’s perceptions of current events since the late-nineteenth century. The ubiquity of newspapers, magazines, and televised news during the mid-twentieth century gave rise to the modern mass media culture, eventually spawning critical discourse from a variety of perspectives. The philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s writings during the 1960s, including the now-famous concept that “the medium is the message,” assert that the form in which information is as significant as the content, an insight that has influenced a generation of artists and critics.
“The timeliness of this exhibition could not be greater. With the recent election still at the forefront of national and international news, it is timely to showcase how contemporary artists have, over recent decades, focused on mass media as a rich source of provocative subject matter that reveals its agendas even as it insists on its objectivity,” says Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “In their need both to represent and to give meaning to their subjects, art and journalism have much in common, and can even feed off each other, as this exhibition demonstrates.”
“Breaking News: Turning the Lens on Mass Media” is on view December 20, 2016 through April 30, 2017, at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, and is curated by Arpad Kovacs, assistant curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum. The exhibition features the work of John Baldessari, Dara Birnbaum and Dan Graham, Donald Blumberg, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Sarah Charlesworth, Omer Fast, Robert Heinecken, Alfredo Jaar, Ron Jude, David Lamelas and Hildegarde Duane, Masao Mochizuki, Antoni Muntadas, Catherine Opie, and Martha Rosler.
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