One picture, thousands of words

The first rule of humor is it should be funny. The second rule is that if you have to explain the joke, then it isn’t funny. An art professor once explained that art should make the viewer uncomfortable. Well the New Yorker certainly accomplished that. At the end of an interview aired on Monday with Terri Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, Ryan Lizza was at pains to explain the cover of the issue in which his story about Barack Obama was featured. He described Barry Blitt’s cover as an act of satire that would have been clearly understood by the magazine’s readership. Well that readership consists of all of 500 people, (It used to be 501 but we let our subscription lapse in the late 1990s) and they're not the Budweiser drinking public either (New Yorker readers probably drink Samuel Adams). That's left The New Yorker’s editor busy trying to do damage control.

That's unfortunate because the cover was supposed to expose the ridiculousness of the rightwing caricature of Barack and Michelle Obama. Sadly, it wasn’t received that way. Interestingly enough, the offending cover isn’t even on The New Yorker’s home page. Still, the cover made a point about the necessity of satire during an election season. Gary Trudeau offers some interesting thoughts about modern satire as a cartoonist. He rightly bemoans the dearth of satire on the comics pages and the disappearance of the political cartoonist from newsrooms across America.

In his book, “Culture of Complaint”, art critic Robert Hughes makes the argument against the use of modern art to champion political causes. He doesn’t seem to have considered the place of satire in art to puncture political pretentiousness. Nor does he seem to have erected a tent big enough to include Trudeau and Blitt and those practicing their trade. In the end, any work of art has to stand and fall on its own merits. If it doesn’t, then it probably has failed, and no amount of explaining can fix that.