HIT BY NEWS

Press Art from the Nobel Collection

The traditional "information industry" was disrupted entirely with the invention of affordable printing presses and paper in the nineteenth century. Books, newspapers, and magazines – previously produced in small numbers and an expensive privilege of the intellectual "happy few" – rapidly advanced into a popular, widespread social phenomenon. The publishing boom was paralleled by the growth of the advertisement industry, and newly invented professions – graphic designer, journalist, reporter, editor, photographer, printer, lithographer, etc. – were all involved in the production of a "second layer of reality" (Jean Baudrillard), printed on paper and delivered to coffee houses and the homes of the quickly growing middle class.

As a direct reaction to these innovations in technology and communication, the visual arts began an impressive process of transformation. Because photography and the printing press began to dominate the fields of documentation and reporting – formerly the domain of the visual arts – the formal abstraction of reality consequently grew to be one of the most important topics in the arts.

A further step in the fruitful and still ongoing dialogue between mass media and the arts included critical reflection on the media’s role as an instrument of propaganda during totalitarian political periods. The Dada movement, for example, was a direct answer to the "fake news" of the Nazis in the 1930s. And the Paris-based "Nouveaux réalistes" reacted with their "décollages" and "emballages" in a playful but contemplative way to the consumerism of the post-war era in Western Europe. The relationship between mass media and art created an intense dialogue and stunning results on both sides. For a short time – during the Bauhaus period – art and media collaborated: El Lissitzky, Max Bill, Wassily Kandinsky, and many others worked towards the utopia of a better world, using art and media as platform for their sociopolitical message.

In the 1960s a new approach revolutionised the visual arts, described as "opera aperta" by Italian philosopher Umberto Eco. Then feminism, gender studies, and postcolonial discourses shaped artworks later in the 1980s, and since the end of the Cold War and the reign of globalisation, a critical review of the media industry has become key to an artistic attitude. And with the impending demise of printed materials, a certain taste of melancholia is inherent in the arts.

All these eminent topics are present in the collection of Zurich-based Peter and Annette Nobel. They started to collect art in the 1980s, when Peter Nobel was working as a lawyer for a leading Swiss publishing house. Since then, the Nobels have been "hit by news", acquiring more than two thousand artworks focusing on the dialogue between art and the press.

Christoph Doswald, a prominent independent curator, has selected a wide range of artworks from the Nobel collection for an exhibition at DOX. HIT BY NEWS takes