Disappearing Ink

Hans Haacke: News, 1969/2008

I left the New Museum’s “The Last Newspaper”—a show that sets out to explore the relation between newspapers and art at the end of the print era—with my fingers black from printer’s ink, just as they used to be years ago when I read the Times every morning on the subway. I can’t remember when they were last begrimed that way, and don’t know whether that is more reflective of the fact that newspapers today use higher-quality inks, or that I tend to read the news online more often than on paper, or that I no longer ride the subway to work. Some of the museum’s ink came from the two newspapers that are published at the exhibition itself and constitute works in the show: the broadsheet New City Reader (edited by Joseph Grima and Kazys Varnelis) and a tabloid, edited by the Barcelona-based curatorial office Latitudes, that has been variously called The Last Post, The Last Gazette, and The Last Register.