Overview
This is an exhibit about your body. It’s about your eyes, ears, nostrils, skin, and tongue. It’s also about that strange, seductive sixth sense, your imagination. How does the news touch your imagination to make your body feel?
Today, “sensational” means an exaggerated, titillating representation of sex or crime. In the 1800s, though, “sensational” simply meant creating a strong impact on the senses. When we recover this historical definition, many newspapers begin to seem sensational.
Newspapers, after all, represent events in words and images. When these words and images become “sensational,” they impact your senses to create a feeling of immediacy. Events are happening now! They are real! They are urgent!
Ad from Harper’s Weekly (1886) to cure “Humiliating Eruptions”
This ad for Skyrizi (2024) bears an eerie resemblance to the 1886 silhouette at left.
This feeling of immediacy makes us forget that the news is an artistic object, crafted by literary and visual choices. This is why it is helpful to look at old newspapers: the events feel distant, so the medium comes into focus. By studying the origins of the news, we can see anew how reporting functions today.
Don’t read these documents for their information. Read them for their design. Suspend your belief: focus on the artifices that construct the sensation of reality. How did these old newspapers stimulate their readers’ sense organs? What visual and verbal strategies did they use to grab attention?
Sensationalism is designed to shake you, startle you, and fill you with feeling. These sensational documents ask a fundamental question, the same question that the news asks today: what does it mean to be a body in relation with the world?
This exhibition includes historical images of and references to sexual assault, lynching, and other acts of violence.
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An exhibit encourages embodiment, and embodiment encourages participation. If you’d like to leave a comment, please get in touch via this web form!