From the Capital Times, a lively Q&A (or as the NYker copy dept. would put it, Q. & A.) with Bob Mankoff and Roz Chast, who visited gracious Madison, WI, on the Cartoon Tour:

Are political cartoons serious art or part of popular culture?

Chast: Who decides what's really serious art? Does that mean expensive? Does it mean an art academic is going to write about it? The question of what's high art or low art has been up in the air for 30 or 40 years. I have gallery exhibits, and artists in the same gallery are making these crappy little sculptures, and people pay $12,000 for them.

Mankoff: Serious art demands that you come all the way to it. Those artists supposedly don't care about you, and they're not in communication with an audience on a constant basis, whereas we're in an ideal state in that we do what we like to do and we're always in communication with readers. We're certainly serious about what we do. I would say that serious art on the money scale is idiotic art because you shouldn't pay $60,000 for a canvas.

I'm itching to see Chast's sketches of those crappy little sculptures, aren't you? In the interview she's surprisingly tart, and it's fun to see her saying things like "[Adjusting to the political landscape after Sept. 11] is like when they dropped the atom bomb, and slowly but surely we began accepting that. You take some Valium, and everything is just fine." Some of her frazzled ladies should follow suit.

Mankoff also says, "Cartoonists have no power so we're as pure as the driven snow." I'm not so sure. Poets are always saying that too (I say it often myself—I can't sell out! I say), but I think we're all mostly wrong. Poetry has a sneaky way of working its way into the collective unconscious, and cartoons do too—as Mankoff knows, New Yorker cartoons especially. Some are obviously more radical than others, but many are provocative without being obviously so; the Alex Gregory cartoon on p. 85 of this week's magazine (which I finally got, thanks) kept flashing back to me all day. It's funny/sad, which reminds me of a great Dave Barry anecdote from Slate:

One week, when [the Miami Herald's Sunday magazine] Tropic converted itself into a kind of Devil's Dictionary, Weingarten instructed Barry to come up with a definition for "sense of humor." Barry disappeared from the office for a few days. He came back with this: "A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge." Then he promptly went back to writing about exploding livestock.

Q & A With the New Yorker's Cartoonists [Capital Times]
Elegy for the Humorist [Slate]

Categories: NYer, Chast, Mankoff, Cartoons