I love this powerful cover to The New Yorker by Eric Drooker.
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| The ancient demon god Moloch sits astride the city for the New Yorker's annual "Money" issue. |
In ancient legend, people hurled their own children into the flames as sacrifices to Moloch. By the time of the Hebrew bible, the book of Leviticus prohibited making such sacrifices, but the dark god continued to find true believers and lives on in allegory. He can be found in the works of William Blake, John Milton's Paradise Lost, and Fritz Lang's Metropolis. More recently, Moloch played a prominent role in Allen Ginsberg's famous poem, Howl. ("What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?")
When Drooker first conceived of this image, he captured it quickly with a ballpoint pen:
In the next version he shed that full moon, choosing instead to illuminate the city from below, under a dark sky-- a masterful touch in my opinion. He then worked out the perspectives in pencil:
He drew the final version in ink, before adding color:
The New Yorker employs many excellent writers who've contributed strong articles about economics and plutocracy, about venal politicians and rapacious investment bankers. But no linear assemblage of nouns, verbs and adjectives, policed by punctuation, can possibly deliver a message the way Drooker's cover does.
Here we see the value of good illustration: an immediate visual impact that grabs you by the lapels, combined with a haunting presence that lingers long after paragraphs of statistics and adverbs have faded. In an instant, the belching smokestacks and steaming nuclear reactor towers are tied to the fiery furnaces of Nebuchadnezzar II, and modern profiteers and collaborators are shown to serve the same dark gods as our primordial ancestors. No written article could get away with such a message.
Drooker never dreamed that the New Yorker would accept such an image for its cover. He didn't draw it for The New Yorker and only submitted it at the urging of a friend. But I'd like to see the New Yorker run more covers like this, covers that recognize today's peril. Some of the essays inside, including those by editor David Remnick, employ stern language suitable to the high stakes for liberal democracy, Yet most of the cover illustrations continue to offer light hearted moments and political jokes. I would love to see more cover art that corresponds to the seriousness of the time.
84 comments:
It wouldn’t fly as a standalone article, because the metaphor is only interesting at the most superficial level.
There is no deep or meaningful connection to be made between the fiery furnaces in Daniel and inequality or economics, other than the trivial fact that capitalism produced factories, and factories like the fiery furnaces, also produce smoke. But so do forest fires, cigarettes, steam trains, rockets, movie pyrotechnics, and so on.
You could just as easily paste the golden calf into an illustration of any of these, with roughly the same effect.
If the editorial staff for the written articles is more discerning than Mouly is with the art, that is a credit to them, not to Mouly.
Moloch is one of the names given to the the pattern of 'non-human' agencies arising within human endeavours and societies. Another manifestation, and symbol, of this pattern would be 'The Golden Calf', which Drooker's image essentially is. A modern equivalent is AI. Intersectional ideology would be an example of another.
P.S. David, if you could delete my 'Anonymous-by-mistake' post above this that would be most appreciated!
This picture is awesome. As Germany turned fascist in the 1930s, magazines showed harsh illustrations and satirical cartoons. It turned out it wasn't enough to stop the Nazis, but at least they did what they could. Artists like Grosz and Szyk understood the issues and screamed for all they were worth. The New Yorker is running out of time before America's Hitler removes their privileges.
If Jeffery Epstein had a cameo in 'Batman: the animated series' this could be his lair.
I remember this cover. It really stood out in my mind. As you say, it's very powerful.
Lawrest
chris bennett-- You're absolutely right, which is what gives this picture the strength of its universality. It could be the god Mammon. It good be AI as you say, or the robot god that will one day own us all.
The scope of this "agency" is so vast that it can't be subsumed even by an extra long article in the NYer, but the poets have been screaming about it for centuries. It is the rough beast that Yeats warns us is slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. One of my favorite poets, Peter Viereck, in his 1948 pulitzer prize winning collection, Terror and Decorum, has a striking poem about the day when the Prince of all tanks ("The God-machine, the tank-who-thinks") is born. On that day, he tells us, all the tanks will dance and humans "will roll to Him like grapes/ Till all their frenzy begs his Metal treads:/ 'Love us to death, love us to death,' the day/ Creation's final goal, Prince Tank is born."
For me, part of what makes Drooker's concept so striking is that the savage god who was there at the formation of human nature, and who we've always known lurks in the subterranean sewers of our nature, is depicted high atop our modernity and our prideful civilization as the crowning glory of all that we've worked for. He's up so high that the people working down below might not even look up and realize for whom they labor. Drooker, as an artist, sees it. He said he couldn't sleep for a long time after doing this drawing.
Richard-- My point wasn't that the editorial staff of the NYer is more discerning than the art editor. My point was that pictures can deliver messages, affect us, and accomplish things that words can't. That's the whole reason for the existence of illustrations, and why the NYer should take that potential more seriously. Certainly not for every issue, or the readership that buys the magazine for cute jokes on the covers would drop off. But every once in a while, we should see more of an acknowledgement of the times in which we live.
Your effort to obfuscate the point of Drooker's cover by pointing out that forest fires and cigarettes make smoke too, seems highly unpersuasive to me. You're judging the universality of poetry, and the multiple faces of Moloch, by the criteria of a copy editor for a news article inside the magazine. If I didn't know better, I'd think someone was being intentionally disputatious.
Modern journalism, for all its faults, still makes some attempt at the truth. But this picture, this dystopian vision, does nothing like that.
The world isn’t Molochian, even in the most distant sense. And so in what way is this picture poetry? Poetry is that which illuminates deeper truths. To call this picture poetry would be to call the world irredeemably evil. For what possible reason could anyone who believes that have to go on?
Richard-- Of course the world is irredeemably evil. Haven't you heard Bob Dylan's song, "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding"? And then the right girl kisses you and the world is perfect. If you don't think both can be "true," how can you believe in art or poetry?
Perhaps you know that Drooker's vision (or the Allen Ginsberg poem on which it is based) is false because you're a cosmological accountant with the power to compare moral assets and liabilities on a metaphysical balance sheet and tell us the outcome. If so, there's a long list of other artists out there, from Ivan Albright to George Grosz, just waiting for your talents.
DA-
They’re not both poetry, for the same reason Kinkade’s painting of the American flag and Statue of Liberty at sunset is not poetry.
They both belong in a strip-mall. One store, a folksy LDS-aligned patriotic bookstore. The other, a novelty gift store for goth teens who make angsty TikToks about the top 1%.
Neither is true, and poetry is true. You don't need to be omnipotent to know when something is retarded.
Oops, not Anon
Richard-- you would've been better off leaving that comment as "Anon."
You’re right, that was sloppy. I figured my prior defenses of Kinkade and other works of his on this blog would soften the tone, but to an outside observer it just sounds mean. What I’m trying to say is retarded is the goth shop and the patriotic book store philosophy in either picture. Anyone who makes concerted effort to make something deserves credit for it, even if I don’t think the picture counts as poetry.
I can't remember seeing such a strong point of view on a magazine cover. I'd like to see more .
Didn't we do this last year? An elephant in a circus wagon? If you praise (or condemn) art for its politics, the conversation soon puts aside line, color and composition and degerates into a discussion of politics. I won't do that today.
Anyway, the only New Yorker cover I ever saw which showed real self-awareness on the part of the editorial staff was Steinberg's "View of the World from 9th Avenue"--unless the staff missed the point completely and thought it meant OTHER wealthy well-connected gits in Manhattan, which is entirely possible.
Robert Piepenbrink-- You'll get no argument from me about Steinberg, who I regard as the first, and best, conceptual artist of the 20th century. I wish that the NYer could find more cover artists who approached his innovative brilliance.
As for the elephant circus wagon last year, my intent was to explore whether the latest digital tools could be used to curate iconic symbols and come up with an effective work of art. How much credit do we give to the artist when most of the elements pre-existed or were AI generated, and yet are massaged to fit together intelligently to create a potent message?
I view Drooker's work of art very differently. You see how he put the picture together, from hand drawn concept to hand inked final version. I think people get mighty edgy and defensive about politics these days. Drooker's cover came out during the Obama administration. As chris bennett properly observed above, "Moloch is one of the names given to the the pattern of 'non-human' agencies arising within human endeavours and societies. Another manifestation, and symbol, of this pattern would be 'The Golden Calf'." And as I noted in other exchanges above, many great poets in history have wrestled with this same deity. I think those who are suspicious of any manifestation of human nature that might apply to the head of their political party are unnecessarily limiting their receptivity to art.
I love the idea and vision behind this work. An how it looks when squinting, and the Lovecraftian perspective. .
But there's something unsatisfactory in how certain details are under-designed (the smoke, the cooling towers...).
Looks like Batman: The Animated Series. Spooky vibes for the kids. As a New Yorker myself the picture looks a lot more like Jersey to me. But even NJ demolished their most iconic smokestack two years ago. NYC only has a handful of smokestacks any more (e.g. 4 big ones from Con Edison powering the city).
The sentiment of the illo is blatant. Left propaganda clear and effective. But as for what keeps me up at night as a New York jew I'll take my chances with "capitalism" over surging Islam with a smiling salesman's face. My entire family is now popping SSRIs.
Lukianoff
Richard-"For what possible reason could anyone who believes that have to go on?" The obvious answer no one says is to watch it all burn. This is the perfect time to be a nihilist.
“But there's something unsatisfactory in how certain details are under-designed (the smoke”
Designed smoke is inherently romantic/poetic, even when painting something terrible like the Eruption of Vesuvius. If you’re trying to make a truly dystopian vision, what’s more dystopian than the photoshop smoke brush?
Anonymous/Lukianoff wrote: "The sentiment of the illo is blatant. Left propaganda clear and effective."
I disagree. One of the things that makes this an excellent work of art in my opinion is that it is susceptible to more than one interpretation, each one acutely true. Moloch could be superstition, the dark forces of human nature that once caused the citizens of Carthage to sacrifice their own babies into the flames and which still seems to run in our veins despite our vaunted civilization with its tall buildings and inventions. Or it could be the opposite, the Moloch of modernity with its hidden dark side: the robots or the AI that encroach on our humanity even as we worship their benefits. It could be the Moloch of materialism (which would make sense because it was selected for the cover of the NYer "Money" issue, although it wasn't drawn for that purpose). It could be, as was said by one commenter, the Biblical golden calf. Or it could be the Moloch of sugar and fried foods: last week I went to a county fair with all kinds of brightly colored carnival rides and unhealthy foods. It reminded me of Pleasure Island in the Disney movie, Pinocchio. As the sun set, a huge neon sign, taller and brighter than all the rest, with blinking lights stood out like a glowing shrine, a magnet for children from all over the fair grounds. It said, "Deep Fried Oreos," and I thought, "this could be Moloch too."
These various interpretations are all genuine issues of human nature but they are NOT, as you fear, "left propaganda." Peter Viereck, the author of "Prince Tank" which I quoted above, was one of the foremost conservative intellectuals of the middle of the 20th century and wrote several important books on the importance of conservatism. Right wing religious leaders raili against worshiping the golden calf. In the 20th century (although not so much today) Republican leaders like Teddy Roosevelt were leaders in conservation of nature from factory smokestacks.
These days we seem to have a bumper crop of citizens enraged by radical left wing conspiracies that they suspect lurk behind every bush. They react with a hair trigger, and with angry rhetoric. May I suggest that this is not the best frame of mind for appreciating the music of art?
This is an effective use of the graphic symbol language to express the idea. That it stemmed from an internal vision, bulls-eyed, deserves credit, especially in an age of imaginative laziness and distraction.
But it is also dispiriting in eight different ways, there’s no love in any of what is being drawn; no evident humanity.
By contrast, I’d point to a favorite Thornton Oakley picture; similar subject but with no editorial agenda, and done with direct observation, textural appreciation, and imaginative memory rather than via ready-made symbols.
Worth noting; in Oakley’s teaching he offered the following maxim, “You get elegance by loving your subject.”
Huh. I thought the villain of the piece was clearly “Profit/Growth”, hence the Bull for “Bull Markets”.
(With the subtext that profits destroy the world, create pollution.)
https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/3683/Collision-CourseEndless-Growth-on-a-Finite-Planet
When you paint the Titanic sinking, you don’t have to love the event or the loss of life. But if you love the dark sea, the foam, the white ice, the beautiful boat, the crowds in dinghies , the lamps, it can be elegant all the same.
But then it doesn’t work as a bit of gift shop propaganda. How are we supposed to know to hate boats sinking if the whole picture isn’t painted with absolute disdain for God and the world?
:) "Gift shop propaganda" is the funniest phrase I've heard in weeks. Kudos if its your own coinage.
One day soon all the manipulative hacks on cable tv that program simple people like you will be gone. But you'll still be sitting there in your underwear, staring into space waiting to be told who to hate or revere, what is or isn't corrupt, and what to be scared of or hope for.
~ FV
Not sure where the head of a political party comes into this, but a lot of people are convinced that all non-leftist thinking is a form of Trump-worship, so let it go. If you seriously mean that making political approval one of the criteria "unnecessarily limits receptivity to art" I fully agree--and I have the bookshelves to prove it. But do you? I've read every post you've ever made on this blog, and never once read you praising conservative or libertarian art as such. When you mention politics at all, it praising someon's courage in selling something vaguely leftist to an art community consisting largely of vague leftists--the courage, as Tom Lehrer said, it takes "to go into a room and be against what everyone there is for--like poverty, war and injustice." (Quote from memory: it's in the run-up to "Folk Song Army.")
Prove me wrong. Do a nice piece on Steve Ditko.
You're absolutely right, which is what gives this picture the strength of its universality.
It's heartening David that we seem to be much in agreement on the subject of Moloch. However, I do not believe it gives Drooker's picture poetic status above being an OK art deco candidate for a dystopian SF novel dust jacket - the reason it made an arresting magazine cover.
The phenomenon of non-human agency, the spirit/angel/demon/egregore thing, is not one that can be properly recognised, understood or tackled on a sensual level. I can back this claim up, but don't feel you need me to get into it here. As such I believe the phenomenon to be more adequately framed by intellectual, that's to say literary, cognition.
When you call everyone who disagrees with you a “leftist” (or any political label), you’re not just describing them, you’re tipping your hand. It shows bias, lumps people into a tribe, and signals you’re more interested in declaring sides than actually engaging with their ideas.
Richard-- you've now offered two additional interpretations, each of which I find valid. The notion that the bull is the mighty engine of commerce that produces bull markets is consistent with philosophy (and art) from the late 19th and early 20th century, celebrating the triumph of industry and man's conquest of nature. There are illustrations from the 1920s glorifying concrete plants. It is neither left wing nor right wing; Stalin said that he hoped the day would come when every baby in the Soviet Union would be born in view of an industrial smokestack.
Your addition, the subtext that bull markets create pollution, is an equally plausible interpretation, although of course there are profits to be made in minimizing and cleaning up pollution.
See how the effective use of symbols in art can be an opportunity for open-ended contemplation and discussion?
Kev Ferrara -- Thanks for the Thornton Oakley, which is now my favorite Thornton Oakley. It's a beauty-- do we know anything about the context in which it was used?
I don't know how you can argue it has "no editorial agenda" when Oakley distinctly shows the humble tenements and homes of poor families, even a church-- how's that for "ready made symbols"?-- overwhelmed by billows of choking industrial pollution. There's no way that the collection of environmental horrors (a locomotive engine, multiple factories with smokestacks, etc.) could be clustered together so closely in real life, especially within a few feet of some poor family hanging out their laundry (to get clean? Hah!). As a matter of basic economics, that family dwelling would've been demolished long ago to make more commercially valuable use of that space. And there's no way that locomotive could've operated in that hilly landscape (which Oakley tilts and distorts beautifully to display the tiers of his "giftshop propaganda").
Richard is presumably unaffected by the Oakley picture because it is "trivial...that capitalism produced factories, and factories like the fiery furnaces, also produce smoke. But so do forest fires, cigarettes, steam trains, rockets, movie pyrotechnics, and so on." This doesn't mean he isn't happy to spring back and criticize from the opposite side as well.
In fact, you and Richard both seem to be playing badminton here, with terms like "love" and "humanity" as your shuttlecocks. A picture isn't good unless the artist makes the humanity "evident," but a humane painting can still be made of an inhumane event such as the choking of those poor neighbors in Oakley's picture, or the sinking of the Titanic because, wait a minute, you can still love the iceberg even if you hate that 1,503 souls were lost. You still can "love" your subject even if it's a hated subject, as long as you love something, even the ice, because if you don't love the ice, the picture can't be sold as "gift shop propaganda" which is apparently a bad thing despite the fact that we started out hating the NYer cover for being "anti-capitalist."
Excuse me for getting a little dizzy from all this, but the nut of the problem seems to be that a picture isn't a good picture unless it loves what you personally love (whether it's capitalism or God or Howard Pyle), and by the way, it doesn't help me much when what you love can change to suit your rhetorical needs. Richard declaims, "The world isn’t Molochian, even in the most distant sense" because he knows better than the people who believe it is (either because they feel they've been victimized by Moloch, or because they celebrate what Moloch does to their enemies.) He informs us that to be marketable in a gift shop, "the whole picture must be painted with absolute disdain for God and the world," which he wants to make sure we know he does not disdain. But of course if it is "elegant" disdain for God and the world, love can still slip in the backdoor.
You love the Oakley picture because you see "love" in his use of propaganda clichés but you see no love in the NYer cover, which baffles me even more. The NYer cover was conceived as an illustration for the Allen Ginsburg poem Howl, which is basically an inelegant scream of pain on behalf of the humanity of the downtrodden and oppressed, the people who are excluded from societal norms. (Drooker was a close friend of Ginsburg.) But this is apparently not the kind of "humanity" you are concerned with, and besides a howl of pain is never elegant enough to express love, so let me move on to suggest that it's silly to assert that Ginsburg (the least marketable, least gift shop conscious poet in memory) was peddling something (unless of course, capitalism is back in favor today.) Drooker, who never planned to submit the picture to the NYer, could hardly have designed it to profit from the lefty God-haters there. I think it was highly unlikely that the NYer would take such a cover, and I think it is to their credit that they did.
Robert Piepenbrink wrote: "I've read every post you've ever made on this blog, and never once read you praising conservative or libertarian art as such."
It's funny, but when I write about conservative artists I admire, such as Mike Ramirez, Jeff MacNelly, Tom Fluharty, Chris Payne, or even Steve Ditko-- none of my liberal readers complain about my conservative bias. I cackle with glee about Tom Fluharty's savage treatment of Hillary Clinton because I find it brilliant. I criticize Shepard Fairey's fawning tribute to Obama because I think it's insipid. Yet I receive not one gripe from a liberal reader about my prejudices.
On the other hand, when I admire a drawing critical of Trump, I get angry mail from readers convinced that my artistic judgment must've been swayed by my bolshevik tendencies. Why do you think that is?
One possibility is that in recent years there has been a lot of very prominent, very bad art in support of Trump: those pictures of muscle bound Trump in a super hero costume, with ray beams coming out of his eyes, his legs spread to show his well endowed package; Trump on trial for rape with Christ sitting by his side, hand on Trump's shoulder; Jon McNaughton's paintings of Trump on Mt. Rushmore or in the oval office surrounded by the admiring founding fathers or Jesus. Artistically, I think these pictures are very poor; thematically, I think they are just dumb. It's hard for me to imagine that anyone but a moron would be impressed by them. Yet I've written about them once or twice because they've been hugely profitable, more than almost any other contemporary illustration I can think of, and hugely effective. If this was amateur art online or posters at a rally, I wouldn't have mentioned them.
Some readers can't believe I'm being objective in criticizing such work. But if you can find me anything comparable on the left, I'll be happy to give you my undiluted opinion of those works too.
"Prove me wrong. Do a nice piece on Steve Ditko."
I've written complimentary posts about the great Steve Ditko on 3 or 4 occasions. In one of those posts I said that I preferred his earlier work to his later, political work, so I would let his art speak for itself. I do think that the quality of his drawing declined as he got further and further into his self-published political era, although I've included examples of art I admire from that period as well. What's your view of the quality of that drawing? Here too I am open minded. If you can point me to examples of his late work that you think are as strong as his great Warren magazine stories, or his Creeper or Dr. Strange-- even the Hawk and the Dove-- I would love to explore them.
The converging of the descending perspective of the architecture and the worm's (worshipper...supplicant) eye view of the bull looks like a kind of prison, and the mechanical idiom of the idol is that of the whole picture, so even the viewer in beholding something horrible is beholden to its way of seeing.
Bill
(the idiom of the idol+the city. /B.)
(Er, not 'converging perpective', but the way the buildings pull/draw down vs the raised bull/B)
See how the effective use of symbols in art can be an opportunity for open-ended contemplation and discussion?
I have no qualms with ‘symbols.’
But art and poetry are meant to act upon symbols, not merely serve as vessels for them.
Oakley has taken the symbols of factories, tenements, wafting steam, and smoke, and acted upon them by way of visual poetry. The result is greater than any symbol taken alone: a picture that communicates inherently visual wisdom and truth.
Drooker (and Kinkade’s Statue of Liberty/flag image) are merely vessels for a symbolic statement. Aside from the blue-green gradient lighting the city from below, which you rightly recognize as key to the picture, Drooker says very little about his symbols. They read like an iconographic sum. That is cartooning’s lowest form.
I knew this discussion was going to get good. All the regular complainers have given their opinions but they can't undo the fact that the Drooker cover is AWESOME! I can't remember ever seeing better on the New Yorker in 25 years.
I see this work in the "architectural fantasy" genre, like Piranesi, Schuiten or Chernikhov.
The problem is, that neighborhood is TOUGH.
Always good to hear from the guy that still eats Lucky Charms for breakfast.
~ FV
In the U.S. we had Hugh Ferris. See his The Metropolis of Tomorrow. Lighting from beneath or "Bottom Lighting" was one of his signatures.
Yeah, he's great. A bit in the shadow (unjustly) of Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
The light from below, coming from street-level signs and air defense searchlights, is the universal symbol of the industrial future past.
Sorry, the spelling is "Hugh Ferriss" for those who might want to look up his work.
Kev Ferrara— I’m traveling today and won’t be able to participate until late tonight but I just wanted to jump in quickly to say that Drooker named Ferriss, Lynd Ward and some 19th century European artists as his primary influences. Your eye remains as sharp as ever. Those who are not familiar with Ferriss might be the type to assume Drooker’s influence was Batman cartoons.
It is difficult to respond here given how divergent our views.
I would have thought that Drooker’s use of the graphic symbol language, a lexicon of ready-to-hand meaning-icons (that easily construct together) would be easily distinguishable from Oakley’s Brandywine-style Imagistic naturalism. The former is a mode of intellectual text writing - which is why one finds it at home at the New Yorker - while the latter is rather more in the way of a haunting dream of a parallel poetic reality; stemming from a wholistic vision, fictional yet true, which pointedly cannot be constructed from symbolic parts. (In the Pyle method, The Image comes in a flash as a totality; synthesized in the crucible of the unconscious by imaginative means still feebly understood. )
The Drooker is perfectly effective as a newsstand communication. On that we can agree. It hits quick, makes its point, and doesn’t really invite lingering. If you delve in, you find yourself either between graphic symbols or looking at their mostly digital crafting. (That working “ink” drawing is at least half digital.) Each of these components, individually, also hits quick, makes its point, and doesn’t really invite lingering. Graphic means blatant, there are no subtleties. What am I looking for down in there?
In contrast, the Oakley is not codified and clarified and pat in message, not in toto nor in part. It invites you to float into it to appreciate the appreciations it offers, the sweep of effects, at scale and in its subtleties. And it gives you the space to do so and the requisite suggestive prompting. It will send you off to dream-land if you let it. Which is to say, it does not only have a point to make.
Dean Cornwell remarked, “You must love the thing you are drawing. Take Gruger. He loves to draw a doorknob and though he is a big husky guy, he can sit down to those small originals and caress it. That’s why it’s good.”
David: "Those who are not familiar with Ferriss might be the type to assume Drooker’s influence was Batman cartoons.”
'Batman: The Animated Series’ … was hugely influenced by Tim Burton’s Batman live action films (production design by Anton Furst), which was in turn influenced by the production design of Gilliam’s Brazil, Lang’s Metropolis, and a host of other art deco visions of the future from the inter-war years. That Ferriss is in that lineage of reference points doesn’t change the fact that the cover most strongly resembles the animated series.
Put an orange toupee on Moloch and we know who he is. Trump's not conservative he's a fucking psychopath. Conservatives were the ones to take advantage of his hate.
https://academyofideas.com/2018/02/carl-jung-shadow-dangers-of-psychological-projection/
It only vaguely resembles. As you mention all these works are "art deco visions of the future". In this work there's no art-deco reference at all, and it's about atavism.
Crap, that was me:
"It only vaguely resembles. As you mention all these works are "art deco visions of the future". In this work there's no art-deco reference at all, and it's about atavism."
Laurence John-- The previous references to Batman were intended to be derogatory ("Looks like Batman: spooky vibes for kids" or "a lair for Jeffrey Epstein on the Batman cartoon." Kev Ferrara criticized the picture for making two commenters think of the Batman cartoon.) If you'd written originally that the Drooker cover, like the Batman cartoon, was in the serious, important tradition of Burton/Furst/Giliam/Fritz Lang, you would have launched a very different series of responses.
xopxe-- Thanks for laying claim to your comment. The dialogue was beginning to disintegrate , as it does every time we have 3 or 4 indistinguishable "anonymouses" firing salvos back and forth. I'm still scratching my head over the comment that somebody(?) eats Lucky Charms for breakfast.
I agree with you that atavism is a large part of this cover. It would've been easy to come up with a modern symbol for Moloch consistent with the modern cityscape. The tension between the primeval deity and the modern city is an important part of the creativity of this cover.
Reading the superficiality and simplicity of the piece as shortcomings equals entirely failing to understand the assignment.
As was stated, this is the «Money» issue. Complexity would be a conceit.
- - -
Postmodern Anonymouse
Like your usual english.
I just wanted to jump in quickly to say that Drooker named […] Lynd Ward […] as his primary influences
Well there’s your problem right there. Lynd Ward is a turd.
Anonymous, please rethink this kind of sniping. There's no honor in it.
Thanks for weighing in on this, Kev. The pride of this blog is that, in an era of low standards and false praise, knowledgeable people can still weigh in with strong opinions, offering articulate reasons for their views. People who look at those strong adjectives and think they can participate by calling an artist a "turd" miss the entire point.
Richard wrote: "Oakley has taken the symbols of factories, tenements, wafting steam, and smoke, and acted upon them by way of visual poetry. The result is greater than any symbol taken alone: a picture that communicates inherently visual wisdom and truth.... Aside from the blue-green gradient lighting the city from below, which you rightly recognize as key to the picture, Drooker says very little about his symbols. They read like an iconographic sum. That is cartooning’s lowest form.
Variations of this argument have been made by a number of commenters, who fault Drooker's image for its "simplicity" as contrasted with the "complexity" in Oakley's. I have trouble with this. If we're looking solely at the meaning of the symbols, I think Drooker's image is more complex, with the kind of healthy ambiguity that invites thoughtful participation in the image. We've discussed many possible meanings of Moloch above, from the worship of wealth to the threat of machines, to the atavistic lingering of our lizard brain despite all of our technological accomplishments, to environmental destruction to the dystopian exploitation of workers, to a literal illustration of Ginsburg's poem Howl. As some have noted, the placement of Moloch at the top of the building and the worm's eye perspective of the viewer contribute to the complexity.
Oakley's painting contains none of this diversity/complexity. It portrays a fairly straightforward conflict between industrial pollution and the impoverished, church going humans who live in close proximity. The elements he uses to show this conflict are sterotypes, painted representationally: the tenements with the laundry hung out to dry, the clichéd church steeple right out of central casting. I agree that Oakley makes "visual poetry" out of these symbols, but they don't have the challenging or troubling content of Drooker's symbols.
So bottom line, I would say the intellectual content of the Drooker drawing is considerably more complex and substantial than the intellectual content of the Oakley painting, which is why I find it curious that the Drooker drawing should be criticized for its simplicity.
Which then takes us to the visual form. The Drooker and the Oakley have two different roles. The Drooker image is a graphic for a magazine cover, and in that sense is more simplified than the Oakley painting, which is a beautifully abstracted, and visually more complex. Apparently some of the commenters feel that black and white, hard line graphic work is by its nature simpler and inferior to an oil painting, which is more of a symphony of elements. I appreciate that there is a visual complexity to the oil painting, but as I've repeatedly argued here (and as I'm sure Beethoven and Mozart would agree) a symphony isn't necessarily a greater work of art than chamber music. They just serve different purposes.
The art of Kollwitz is just black and white graphic work, but it has a power and beauty and intention that is separate from a Rembrandt painting.
David,
In order to even begin to have a sensible discussion viz. your "Chamber Music" analogy, you first need just a wee little bit of education in just how complex even individual musical notes are. They are not graphic, blatant, binary, stepped modules. Each note has a world in it, begins and ends with peculiarities, changes in sonority and pitch, undulating with overtones in certain sequences, amplified at formants, warbling in and out of tune often imperceptibly in every register.
This is why the antiseptic roboticism of the symbolic graphic component language cannot be saved by your classical music reference. Unless less is saying more, it is, in fact saying less. Less with less, which is paucity. You need to be educated in order to see the meteor-sized hole in your defense...
CLICK ME TO LEARN ABOUT SOUND COMPLEXITY
Oakley's painting contains none of this diversity/complexity. It portrays a fairly straightforward conflict between industrial pollution and the impoverished, church going humans who live in close proximity.
And Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X is a “picture of a lady in a dress”.
Are we talking about pictures or words? Because the “complexity” you’re claiming Drooker has here doesn’t even compare with the symbolic complexity of your average paragraph from a New Yorker editorial, let alone an even mediocre poem or song lyric.
As for visual form, ought that not be the core of a discussion about a picture?
Or should we celebrate a man with a guitar belting out proofs of the Riemann Hypothesis as great music, simply because the proofs are good?
Anyway, it is a gross understatement to say that Drooker is “more simplified.”
One of these is a work of Art, a carefully composed vision, where each line is a dance, each form a story, and each effect a moody sonata.
The other is mere hieroglyphics, symbols for building, window, or smokestack, projected many times mechanically to signify a dystopian city, the way three kanji trees (木) signify a forest (森) by mere addition and repetition of a ready-made icon.
Kev Ferrara-- just to make sure that I understand where you went wrong in your reaction to my symphony / chamber music analogy: does your argument hold true if you are comparing a sensitive line drawing with a painting? A sensitive line could have all the qualities you describe ("peculiarities, changes in sonority and pitch, undulating with overtones") and yet like all graphic work it is essentially binary-- either there is a mark or there isn't (even if some of those marks along the line are softer or lighter or broader). I view that as qualitatively different from a symphonic painting, where multiple marks are orchestrated simultaneously, to create harmony, or with different kinds of instruments with different sounds (the equivalent of different colors)?
If you agree with me that chamber music, stripped down to a small group of essentials, is not by its nature inferior to a symphony, then you should agree that a drawing is not by its nature inferior to a painting-- just different. And if you've come with me that far, I don't see how you stop short of agreeing that graphic art is not by its nature inferior to a painting, even if it is "simpler."
I agree with you that, "Unless less is saying more, it is, in fact saying less." The trick is knowing when less IS saying more. When it comes to content, I've offered about a dozen interpretations above where the Drooker picture is content rich. I am waiting for someone to tell me any variety in the message of the Oakley painting, other than the one obvious one. Now if you want to talk about form rather than content, that's a different matter.
Richard wrote, "As for visual form, ought that not be the core of a discussion about a picture?"
Unfortunately for me, the answer seems to depend on the time of day and the day of the week. When I talk about purely abstract art that I like, I'm scolded that visual form must be melded to representational content to be worthwhile. When I like visual forms that were achieved digitally or photographically, the visual form becomes subordinate to its genesis.
So should visual form be the core of our discussion? You tell me. All I ask is that you pick one side and stick to it.
A sensitive line could have all the qualities you describe ("starting and ending peculiarities, changes in sonority and pitch, undulating with overtones")
You think a line can sport an overtone sequence that gives it timbre? Do you even understand what you are saying?
A line can't even have color tonality; musical tones are sonic colors. Lines - in the general understanding of that word - having no colortonality - are more like percussion; textural. (One can still build form and pattern with percussion.)
Even if you drew a line with a colored pencil, its colortonality/sonority would be dwarfed by the refraction of all the empty space around it also going into the eye. (And the visual relationship would be of value, because one generally draws on a neutral ground, often white.)
To *actually* get overtones with, say colored pencils or pastel pencils, you would need to build up color areas. Which is to say, you would need to paint with the pencils. Which is no longer drawing in the sense you mean it.
A sensitive line (...) like all graphic work it is essentially binary-- either there is a mark or there isn't.
Graphic means blatant. A sensitive line is the opposite of blatant. Many a sensitive line starts and ends with a gradation. And many are quite quiet, drawing you in to the drawing.
An orchestra can play chamber music, but a small ensemble can not play an orchestrated symphony. Since a symphony orchestra contains all the instruments of a chamber ensemble, obviously the orchestra can obtain all the emotions of the ensemble, but the reverse is not true. Which is to say, a small chamber ensemble is inferior in capacity. The parallel with drawings vs paintings, I would think, is obvious. (But I've been wrong before.)
Graphics are more like a drum and kazoo band. If you can point me to the sense-able and sensible equivalent of a viola solo in the Drooker, that might be edifying to the point of making me pass out from shock.
Given your dis-understanding of complex narrative-poetic art, and your (probably not coincidental) interest in art built of ready-made modules that can be read like text, having no mystery in the expression, wholly surfaced for instant decoding into English and then discussion, it begins to make sense why you would argue for simple lines and other blatant symbols over - or at least equivalent - to all other forms of visual expression.
Really what you're arguing for is an equivalence in visual entertainment value or communication aptitude. Yes, the graphic symbol language, inherently standardized and dogmatic as it is, makes quick work of converting editorial ideas into diagrams. How that relates to art and artfulness, I don't know. Cartoons are great fun, graphics are dynamic as they inform, but neither are great paintings. Their relations are simply far too limited, thus their effects are as well.
I daresay, all you are revealing in your discussion of the Oakley is that you have no idea what's going on in the Oakley; how it was created, what are the thoughts imbedded in it, how does the language work... And not being able to decrypt it and move on with talking about it "intellectually" just isn't your cup of tea. If you can't instantly decode what you are looking at, it seems, your reflexive belief is that it must not be saying anything at all. At least nothing "intellectual."
The problem with your problem is that in art, form and content are the same thing and everything is suggestive. Whereas in text, form references content and all primary meanings are stated outright; so the bookish literalists don't get sweaty because they can't complete their homework.
You said, “So should visual form be the core of our discussion? You tell me. All I ask is that you pick one side and stick to it.”
When I have spoken negatively about Abstract Expressionism or photography, my goal has always been to point to the ways in which those forms are visually inferior.
That is, I am saying that squiggles are not as good at visual expression as a fine dab of draftsmanship, and that a photograph, in purely visual terms, has less to offer than a good painting.
We do not have the words to fully capture these visual differences. Purely visual content cannot be spoken in words, we can only use words to point toward the visual content in front of us, never to stand in for it. So I am left to verbally indicate these visual differences by discussing representation itself, in the case of Abstract Expressionism, or the method of production, in the case of photography. But neither representation nor production method is ever the real point when it comes to the picture. I’m sure Kev feels the same way when he’s argued about AI art with me.
In this thread, when I have complained about the mental state of the artist (an artist who is primarily politically motivated), it is not the state itself that is the problem, but the visual content that this state produces.
I even believe that there are such things as “moral” line works and “immoral” line works, that these moral or psychic states tend to produce works that differ in specific ways as purely visual content. It therefore becomes necessary to discuss those states to point to these visual differences.
So I do not feel that I have been inconsistent in that regard.
To you, I would only make the same recommendation: if you are comparing Drooker’s and Oakley’s symbolic complexity, let it be preamble to an argument about some perceived quality in Drooker’s visual content that you think is missing from Oakley. That would be reasonable, although I will no doubt disagree. If, however, your argument is that Drooker’s symbolic content by itself has anything to do with art, I must wholeheartedly disagree.
David: "If you'd written originally that the Drooker cover, like the Batman cartoon, was in the serious, important tradition of Burton/Furst/Giliam/Fritz Lang, you would have launched a very different series of responses."
That wasn’t the point of my previous comment though. It was that despite any earlier influences or lineage you could mention, the image still looks mostly like the animated series (than it does Hugh Ferriss or anyone else). Apologies if my first post sounded flippant. I was just being bluntly honest. I can't un-see the Drooker image as anything other than a piece of animation background art for an evil, rich mogul.
By the way, I prefer the Drooker to the Oakley. Although it's made from clean, simplified, graphic statements, it's a more successfully constructed image, 3-D wise. The spatial relationships between the various environmental 'zones' in the Oakley are so unconvincing that I thought I was looking at a 'montage' type image at first, like those movie posters where different parts of the story float next to each other.
Kev Ferrara wrote: "A line can't even have color tonality...if you drew a line with a colored pencil, its colortonality/sonority would be dwarfed by the refraction of all the empty space..."
How can someone who purports to believe that it's all about the poesis be such a literalist (unless of course he’s just trying to be disputatious?) A pencil line can be lush, tentative, bold, aggressive, sprightly... but you’re telling me that the analogy to music is inapposite because the line can't be charted on an oscilloscope. Stop trying to be so difficult.
"Graphic means blatant. A sensitive line is the opposite of blatant." So I guess the great graphic artists like Rembrandt didn't employ sensitive lines.
"a small chamber ensemble is inferior in capacity. The parallel with drawings vs paintings, I would think, is obvious." Yes, it's quite obvious-- drawings have an inferior number of colors to paintings. It's not clear what significance you draw from this, since it of course has nothing to do with the quality of the picture, its artistic merit, its effectiveness, power, emotion, sensitivity, etc.
And now I'll have to go back through everything to find your Ditko post, which I still don't remember. But I'd agree with your overall point: art of any sort and propaganda have a touchy relationship. I tend to see it more in literature. Usually as the writer ages he amps up the political volume and characterization and plausibility especially suffer--which is why late Heinlein, late M.Z. Bradley and late LeGuin aren't on my shelves, and there are still two Terry Pratchetts I've never managed to flog myself through.
Worst pro-anyone stuff I've seen in American politics in my lifetime has been narrative rather than graphic, in support of JFK, Obama and Hillary Clinton. The ANTI-Trump graphics are sorry and unimaginative enough for anyone, but I tend to dwell in the graphic past--early and not late Steig, for instance. Not sure how you measure the effectiveness of the pro-Trump drawings--or the anti-Trump ones, come to that.
As for the bias accusations only coming from one side, I'll have to re-read Fluharty & Co. Have you written anything accusing someone on the left of getting worse artistically as he got more political, as you did with Ditko? Or praised anyone on the right for courage, as you did with this one?
If it's actually my bias, I'm sorry. I really try to ground criticism in facts and reason.
Yes; all poetry.
And poetry is built of effects. And effects have structures. And those structures need to be engineered.
Thus I speak about poetry from a technical standpoint. When I say less is more only if it says more, I am being technical about the method of poetic concision.
When I say that the analogy of the chamber orchestra does not apply to minimalist visual works (which graphic works are) I say so because individual musical notes have so much information in them (see video linked above) that gives them a richness that designers/modernists cannot approach through their erroneous attempts to be musical via flat graphic spots. Again, this is a technical argument. (I can add a bit about the musical problem with photoshop gradations, if you'd like.)
Rembrandt was a fine artist. All fine art has a "graphic" component that is actually not what it appears to be. It derives from the use of the principle of Breadth. Which then leads to the powers of subtlety. Graphics is a bowdlerized version of breadth. (As I've often said, all the principles of graphic design are dumbed down versions of ideas developed in pictorial composition.)
If you don't have colors, there are vast classes of effects you cannot engineer. Effects are qualitative experiences, even as they are meaningful. The inability to manifest certain effects/certain qualities of experience would, of course, affect the quality of a picture.
And since it is effects that affect us emotionally, especially broadly when orchestrated into complexes aimed at a total effect, limiting one's effects limits the available emotional manipulations one may deploy against an audience.
I've yet to see you post a "minimalist" composition that has even a hundredth of the level of complexity of anything played by, for example, the Brodsky Quartet ever. Unless you understand the complexity of even "simple" music, every visual analogy you make to it will be suspect technically, and probably painful.
Kev: "The inability to manifest certain effects/certain qualities of experience would, of course, affect the quality of a picture."
It sounds as if you're comparing a Sargent oil painting to a digital image of a grinning chimp made out of large square pixels. But surely an Egon Schiele drawing on white paper vs a Sargent oil painting would be an acceptable comparison in David's chamber music vs full orchestra analogy ?
No one should call Lynd Ward a "turd" but it's still OK to call Trump a turd because everybody knows that's what he is.
There are Schiele paintings that are composed musically, even in their graphic-ness.
But a drawing without color; such cannot produce tonal harmonies because one cannot play or sing notes to harmonize with. ("Harmonies" of line and shape are not the same kind of thing; they don't analogize to music where actual notes are played against one another. Same with "music of forms" in sculpture, which is really animation.)
Chamber music, string quartets, etc.... are all based on notes, fundamentally. Thus color... color harmonies... color keys and key changes.
The "color" of musical notes is a real thing and an authentic analogy with visual color. Speaking basically....
There's an A-flat (Ab) on the piano at around 100 hz. Which means there is also one 50 hz, and 25 hz. And then also at 200, 400, 800, 1600, and 3200 hz. They are at different pitches or "pitch-heights", but each is still Ab - still has that root color to it.
Similarly, you can paint a very deep rich Oxblood red, then a maroon, then a brick red, then a cadmium red, then a scarlet, then a light red, then a salmon, then a rose red, then a pink. Similarly, all at different pitches, but all still red in hue.
Drawing - presuming a monotonal drawing implement - is more like sculpture. If it gets very tactile or accented, it can be quite percussive. Texture and Tectonics.
Great music that seems simple is, in fact, only deceptively simple-sounding. More generally, great popular art breezes along, but when you sit down to analyze it, you are blown away by how integrated the complexity. And then when you analyze a single expressive note, you are again stunned by how much interesting sonic information is present in what seems like so little.
Wow. I’m as speechless as David was in his last comment to you.
I can't find the content in your rebuke. Why did you write it?
There’s nothing to rebuke. You’ve demonstrated that you’re unable to see an Egon Schiele drawing on white paper vs a Sargent oil painting as an example of David’s chamber music vs full orchestra analogy.
You’ve demonstrated that you’re unable
Are you being serious?
It's super easy to "understand" highly abstracted analogies. I mean, a ground hog is shaped like a cloud; sure thing. If you just forget all the details.
We're discussing aesthetic points. I'm offering actual aesthetic analogies so that people reading understand art better. I'm deliberately trying to get away from smart-sounding rhetoric that doesn't make practical contact with the ground truth. We're already drowning in ghost information; 100 years hence.
When you hear harmonies in your ears, the effect is first physical. Same with visual harmonies. Colorspace and Soundspace are both dimensional, both helical actually. Harmonic resonance is vibratory and multi-directional and can create the effect of aesthetic/illusory space. In line, textures and patterns substitute for colors, but cannot replace them aesthetically. In grayscale or monotone, values substitute for colors; linear projection is possible, but you don't get the kind of emotion-tinged spatial inflation one gets with hue and chroma added in.
Robert Piepenbrink-- It would be cruel and unusual punishment to ask anyone to go back through all the posts on the blog. You should see a search window in the upper left corner, but to save you the trouble, here are two of my posts that are complimentary of Ditko (the second one noting, however, that I think less of his later political work; if you have a differet view of that part of his career, I'd welcome your thoughts).
https://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2006/05/one-lovely-drawing-part-six.
htmlhttps://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2018/07/a-ditko-tribute.html
As for the slippery topic of art vs. propaganda, we (meaning readers and I) have discussed it here before, and I'm sure we'll discuss it again. I simply have not seen adulatory art about Biden, Clinton, or Obama the way I've seen adulatory art about Trump-- art which treats him like a demigod. After JFK was assassinated a number of lower middle class homes hung small posters of JFK, his face in the clouds alongside Martin Luther King, but I vew that as a totally different phenomenon. If you can point me to some examples I'd appreciate it.
And now I'll have to go back through everything to find your Ditko post, which I still don't remember.
To search for something on a specific site in Google you just add “site:URL.com” after your search term.
https://www.google.com/search?q=ditko+AND+site%3Aillustrationart.blogspot.com
"Anonymice" I think. But I have a hard time paying attention to anything without a name attached, and take points off when the "name" is a handle.
Never punishment to re-read well-written material, but I'm going to run out of hours one of these days with stuff still undone. Anyway, thanks.
Ditko. His work went bad, you tell me when he adopted his "half-baked political philosophy." Well, first you'd have to explain why Aristotelian philosophy and Libertarian politics are less baked then the politics of other illustrators. That's not really your job as an art critic, but you were the one to bring it up. Then you'd have to show how this manifested in his art. Was his composition off? Was there something wrong with his lines? You don't say, and you don't show. And mind you, he went full Randite while still drawing Spiderman, so there was plenty of "Ditko as Libertarian" material to choose from. I was buying him off the racks at the time, and I never noticed a decline in those years. (I'd grant anyone the Warren work is better, but it's also bigger panels and no color.)
I think he's catching flak because the writing became more political when he slipped his leash at Marvel, and there I'd agree. It's not easy to use fiction to push a new view of the world on the reader, and often makes for bad story-telling. Ditko may actually have done better than most, which is remarkable given he only had 10-12 pages most of the time. But "better than most" in this instance sets the bar pretty low. Point is, if I'm right about this, Ditko the illustrator is being faulted for the failures of Ditko the writer--the specific failure being a world view you find unfamiliar and distateful, which is the thing to be demonstrated.
Let me work on Obama for a bit. The absolute worst I remember wasn't graphic. It was video of schoolchildren singing hymns--I suppose peans in context?--to him. Nothing like it that I can think of in the United States since the ACW and "We are Coming, Father Abraham" and, bluntly, Lincoln had earned it in three years of a war which would cost him his life. All Obama had done at that stage was be elected. Never heard of schoolchildren being taught hymns to Trump. Pretty sure the NEA and AFT would see the teacher never worked again.
Robert Piepenbrink-- We've had lots of zesty exchanges here about the difference between art and propaganda, and the considerable overlap between the two. My favorite discussions were Kaethe Kollwitz in Nazi Germany ( https://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2006/08/where-men-and-mountains-meet_09.html ) and William A. Smith who drew propaganda for the OSS during World War II ( https://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2008/08/william-smith.html ). Ditko is a prime example of the issue and would've been a close third.
In response to your point, I don't think "Aristotelian philosophy and Libertarian politics" are half baked per se, but I think that Ditko's version of those by the 1990s were so shrill and obsessive that they drove all the art out of his work. The loving care behind his earlier drawings-- the powerful brushwork, the strong compositions, the creative treatments, but especially those wonderful eccentric moods he created-- disappeared. In their place he seemed to frantically churn out stick figure symbols and diagams for his polemics. It was as if he felt the fate of society depended on his repeating his same angry arguments for the 43rd time.
Compare the work that he put into his mystery and sci fi stories in the 50s, and then his beautiful work on Dr. Strange and the Warren magazines in the 60s (his high water mark, IMO) and even his work on Questar and Static in the 1980s, with his rushed, simplified, agitated work in the late 80s and 90s. The difference seems obvious to me.
None of this is to say that Ditko shouldn't editorialize with his work. I think he did that successfully with Mr. A and other work for Witzend, as well as with his work for DC which gave him a longer editorial leash than Marvel (the Creeper, Hawk & Dove). When he could tie his politics into actual plots, and draw them with care, his opinionated work was great. I never minded that he always redrew the same stereotypical hippies and beatniks who comically spat on the same glorious achievements of western civilization. That was kind of fun. But for me the artistic elements slowly drained away and left only the rage and impatience, and the silly diagrams of rudimentary political stereotypes you might expect from a high school student who had just read Ayn Rand for the first time. As I said, "half baked."
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