Sent to you by Sean McBride via Google Reader: David Levine on Being Retouched by 'The New Yorker' via Mondoweiss by Philip Weiss on 10/14/08 From the new Vanity Fair, David Margolick writing about artist/caricaturist David Levine:
The New Yorker’s handling of another piece of work, in 2005, this one of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and then Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon sitting around a conference table, was more disturbing to him. At the magazine’s request, Levine says, he placed sinister, hooded figures brandishing machine guns behind Abbas. To balance things off (at least in his own mind), he added some gigantic missiles alongside Sharon. When the drawing appeared, however, he was shocked to see that the missiles had vanished: never before, he says, had his art been altered behind his back. After that, he goes on, he got no further assignments from the magazine. “David Levine is a great political artist and kept on publishing with us after this, but all I remember about this was thinking that with Sharon being so ominously huge in the drawing, the bombs were too much,” says David Remnick, The New Yorker’s editor. “More important, if the implication is that we made the change for ominous political reasons, he is, with respect, wrong. This article didn’t pull punches on Sharon, to say the least.” Before long, though, the magazine did stop commissioning Levine: his new work required too much retouching. Seems to be a little parallax there on whether Levine ever got commissioned again. Thanks to Jeet Heer for the spot. Things you can do from here: - Subscribe to Mondoweiss using Google Reader - Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites
