I spent some time in New York in early December and I was really pleased to devote a few hours to the New Museum, where there were two ongoing exhibits that touched on subjects close to my heart: "The Last Newspaper", and "Free".

I was most curious about the free exhibit, because we're still seeing new directions for how the internet disrupts both meanings of the word free - how we think about liberty (personal and societal), and how we assign value to things. Seth Price's essay "Dispersion" is both an inspiration for the exhibit and a part of the exhibit, where it is the eponymous essay in Essay with Knots. From a New Museum article about his work: "Price discusses attempts by conceptual artists to circumvent the structures of the art world and the art market by co-opting the distribution-oriented, communicative media associated with popular culture."

In "Dispersion", Price's primary focus is on how the way we foster collective experience has shifted:

“…Collective experience is now based on simultaneous private experiences, distributed across the field of media culture, knit together by ongoing debate, publicity, promotion, and discussion. Publicness today has as much to do with sites of production and reproduction as it does with any supposed physical commons, so a popular album could be regarded as a more successful instance of public art than a monument tucked away in an urban plaza.”

While I felt the exhibit didn't always adhere to its own purported subject, the artists did a good job of examining some philosophical implications of our relationship with the internet - how we interact with art and one other online. A good example of this is how Joel Holmberg's Legendary Account uses crowdsourcing (in this case, the lowest common denominator crowdsourcing destination, Yahoo Answers) to seek answers to deep, existential questions like "How does it feel to be in love?" or "How possible is it to convince someone I am an artist?".

The newspaper exhibit, by contrast, explored its topic a little more directly, "deconstructing the power and possibilities of the press". Each of the tables Wolfgang Tillmans set up around the exhibition space display some piece of cultural zeitgeist as framed by journalistic discussion - one table focused on religion, featuring the protests about the mosque at Ground Zero, the popemobile, photos of men kissing, and so on.

A few pieces, including Sarah Charlesworth's Movie-Television-News-History, June 21, 1979, looked at who made it into the news and who didn't, and how each medium subverts news content differently.

The Hans Haacke installation News was particularly eloquent. An old-fashioned printer on a table in the middle of the room spews information out in wild spurts every few minutes as its RSS feeds update. The machine clacks and chatters, producing an unmanageably large pile of pages of information in a short period of time.

In the end, I was pleased the two exhibits were on at the same time, and I think the Newspaper exhibit was somehow easier to synthesize. Our relationship to the idea of free is much more diffuse and ambiguous than our relationship to print (and broadcast) media. How we interact with the internet and the world around us is in constant flux, and the artists represented in that exhibit did a good job of representing the ambiguity and the possibility. Check out the Free site for some really interesting behind-the-scenes theorizing.