I arrived at “Modern Look,” the Jewish Museum’s newest exhibit, ready for what it promised: a bird’s-eye view of midcentury magazine photography. But I was preoccupied, as I have been for weeks, with a very different media moment.
The recent documentary “Framing Britney Spears,” which showed how exploitative coverage eroded the singer’s mental health, has prompted a collective double-take at the media culture of the 2000s, when body-shaming, hypersexualization, and pointlessly cruel takedowns ruled the day. We may associate those tactics with tabloids, but they were also on display at prestige magazines: One particularly leering piece that resurfaced in the film’s wake was a 2004 Rolling Stone profile of Lindsay Lohan, which started out by assuring the reader that the 18-year-old’s “breasts are real.”