Breaking News: Turning the Lens on Mass Media

unknownunknown-1

Breaking News: Turning the Lens on Mass Media is on view December 20, 2016-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 Department of Art faculty member Ron Jude, John Baldessari, Dara Birnbaum and Dan Graham, Donald Blumberg, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Sarah Charlesworth, Omer Fast, Robert Heinecken, Alfredo Jaar, David Lamelas and Hildegarde Duane, Masao Mochizuki, Antoni Muntadas, Catherine Opie, and Martha Rosler.

LOS ANGELES – 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. Featuring photographs and video made over the last forty years, Breaking News: Turning the Lens on Mass Media, on view December 20, 2016-April 30, 2017 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center explores how artists have responded to the media’s coverage of topics ranging from local stories to international politics and military conflict.

“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.”

Post a comment

You may use the following HTML:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>