How artists use the news media as a springboard for exploration and execution is the premise of an exhibition that opened yesterday at the New Museum. Don't pay too much attention to the title, though: The Last Newspaper, as the show is called, is somewhat misleading in its implication that the decline of print media is the message here. That idea is a minor subtext in a freewheeling exploration of how artists take charge of and remake the flow of information that defines our perception of the world.

Left and center: Network Architecture Lab's New City Reader installation; right: the Slought Foundation's Perpetual Peace Arena.

The nerve center is the museum's third floor where several artist groups and organizations are collecting and disseminating information about the life of, and around the show, as it unfolds. One of the most intriguing is The New City Reader, which will be published weekly during the run of the exhibition. Created by Kazys Varnelis' Network Architecture Lab at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, the inaugural issue, which is a monster-size tabloid format, details the causes of the 1977 New York blackout, and how the New York Times continued publishing by using imaginative workarounds.

As executive editor Joseph Grima (currently the editor of Domus and formerly director of Storefront for Art and Architecture) explained, the publication is intended to be a billboard-like product, along the lines of Dazibao, or large character news posters, whose ancient roots in China came to the forefront during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The paper also takes visual cues from counterculture publications of the 1960s, such as those created by Archigram, the avant-garde architectural group that originated at London's Architectural Association at the time. Each edition will cover a segment of city news, much like sections of the New York Times do, said executive editor Alan Rapp, who will bring students from the MFA Design Criticism program at School of Visual Arts in to produce an upcoming edition. Other groups operating on the third floor are Story Corps, The Center for Urban Pedagogy, the Slought Foundation, and Latitude, which will also publish a weekly newspaper.

The Last Newspaper also includes art works from 1967 to the present that often take death, and the manipulation of facts, as their subjects. One of the most gripping is Sarah Charlesworth's Movie-Television-News-History (1979), in which she addresses the coverage of an American newscaster's on-camera murder by the troops of Anastasio Somoza at a checkpoint in Nicaragua. Completely visual, with texts eliminated, her series of 27 enlarged pages of major American newspapers shows the importance each organization gave to the story in terms of its placement, from page one to page six.

Left to right: Eating the Wall Street Journal (New Millennium Edition) 2010 by William Pope.L; Untitled (Sotheby's-Rosenthal) 2007 by Rachel Harrison; News, 1969/2008 by Hans Haacke. Photos: Peggy Roalf.

Although newspapers make up the core concern of artists in the show, other media are also represented, including A Dutiful Scrivener (2010), a video interview with Bill McDonald, chief obituary writer at the New York Times by Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere; a vintage dot-matrix printer (above, right) re-engineered to receive and output RSS feed from news organizations around the world by Hans Haacke; and the Slought Foundation's Perpetual Peace Arena, a large circular blue carpet where participants will gather to discuss important social issues.

The Last Newspaper continues through January 9, 2011, at the New Museum. 235 Bowrey, opposite Prince Street, NY, NY.

Correction: On Friday, October 1, I described dango as skewered meat. I subsequently realized that the Zen diet is vegetarian. Dango is translated from the Japanese as "dumpling."

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