One of the highlights of the Armory Show is the Elizabeth Dee booth, which features a Josephine Meckseper installation, similar in interest to her Mall of America video on view at the Whitney (see Feb. 25 post) but more familiar in its use of the signature storefront tableau medium. Among the nylons, sweatshirts, and assorted restaged window furnishings is a cracked-Plexiglass-encased copy of the 2009 issue of Artforum, in which Dan Graham's 1968 Harper's Bazaar run of the 1965 piece Naturalized took the cover. This detail of an encased print publication in a deconstructed retail facade raises questions about the magazine's possible future as a fetishized object of exchange value in the increasing absence of its use value as an effective timely carrier of information.

Meckseper’s treatment of Artforum is part of a larger interest in the past few years to engage print media as content.   "The "New Photography 2009" show at The Museum of Modern Art this past fall included two prime examples of this tendency, including Carter Mull's 2009 c-print Eleven, one of several of his heavily manipulated scans of the front page of the Los Angeles Times—which becomes an alien artifact, suggesting a future-perfect look back onto the increasingly strange artifact of a printed newspaper; in the same show, Leslie Hewitt's Riffs on Real Time Riffs on Real Time (2002-05), reactivating an Ebony cover, similarly treats the  once-efficacious print as the content of the present.  The “print as content” phenomenon extends to numerous other recent works; to name a few, Kelley Walker's King magazine scans such as Aquafresh plus Crest with Whitening Expressions (Regina Hall), Matthew Day Jackson's LIFE, June 12, 1944, Dash Snow’s Gotcha!, and Taryn Simon’s Playboy in Braille, and numerous others.