Newspapers have appeared as everyday objects in art for probably as long as they’ve existed. In the National Gallery of Art’s “Shock of the News,” however, the newspaper takes on more central roles, as surface, mark, symbol, or support. In 1909, the poet Filippo Marinetti published his “Futurist Manifesto” in Le Figero, and it is the starting point of when the newspaper was no longer a subject, but a conceptual vehicle to drive art forward. Cubists pasted scraps of newspaper into their compositions. Picasso, Kline, and others sketched on it. The Dadaists collaged its machine-made texts into poems. Rauschenberg, Johns, and deKooning used it as a painting surface. Salvador Dalí and Yves Klein made fake newspapers. Sarah Charlesworth has reproduced them to critique how pictorial emphasis varies between periodicals published on the same day. Despite its ongoing and prolonged death, the newspaper remains ubiquitous as a source of images, a surface for composing, and as an object to stitch. While the exhibit’s disparate directions could leave it longing for some thread of clarity, if it’s sure to have one reinforcing theme, it’s the artist’s prerogative to make something out of the discarded and ignored.