Two days ago, the Huffington Post blog posted a photo essay which reinforced common negative stereotypes about caricatures and caricature artists.
Here's a quote:
Check out the bizarre caricature drawings we found, ranging from the good, the bad, and the ugly (mostly ugly) and vote for the one with the most "WTF?!"
"Mostly ugly" ???????????
Some of the images used were without permission from the artists, two of whom, Joe Bluhm and Chris Rommel, are winners of the highest honor that the International Society of Caricature Artists can bestow--the Gold Nosey. Furthermore, the samples used are years old, in Chris's case, from 2003. Another artist I know, Chris Chua, does wonderful abstract-cubism-type caricature, and his drawing of a colleague is currently 'topping' their poll.
Now, I know all publicity is supposed to be good publicity, and I know it's someone's opinion. It's the comment section that shows both stupendous public ignorance of our craft as well as support ( in fact the reason I am posting a link to it on my blog is to enlighten my readers about that). In my opinion, I think that this article shows crass laziness on the part of the HP. If you're going to label high-caliber caricatures as "ugly", do some research-- don't just snipe on our livelihood. We caricature artists dish it out, we can take it too...if it's done intelligently.
Wonderfully said Emily!
ReplyDeletewhen they write an article, they try to make it sound like it comes from an angle. The angle here is "look how bad these are", but the writer may not necessarily feel that way, they just want to increase readership.
ReplyDeleteIt's sad, but most of the articles are written this way.
Patty, I agree. If the author really wanted to show that angle, though, he could have shown some truly bad-quality ones:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/hleon/detail?entry_id=63368
(Just found that link on Jert's FB.)