Book Description

From the New York Times’s former Op-Ed art director, the true story of the world’s first Op-Ed page, a public platform that prefigured the blogosphere. Jerelle Kraus, whose thirteen-year tenure as Op-Ed art director far exceeds that of any other art director or editor, unveils a riveting account of working at the Times. Her insider anecdotes include the reasons why artist Saul Steinberg hated the Times, why editor Howell Raines stopped the presses to kill a feature by Doonesbury’s Garry Trudeau, and why reporter Syd Schanburg—whose story was told in the movie The Killing Fields—stated that he would travel anywhere to see Kissinger hanged, as well as Kraus’s tale of surviving two and a half hours alone with the dethroned outlaw, Richard Nixon. All the Art features a satiric portrayal of John McCain, a classic cartoon of Barack Obama by Jules Feiffer, and a drawing of Hillary Clinton and Obama by Barry Blitt. But when Frank Rich wrote a column discussing Hillary Clinton exclusively, the Times refused to allow Blitt to portray her. Nearly any notion is palatable in prose, yet editors perceive pictures as a far greater threat. Confucius underestimated the number of words an image is worth; the thousand-fold power of a picture is also its curse . . . Features 142 artists from thirty nations and five continents, and 324 pictures—gleaned from a total of 30,000—that stir our cultural-political pot. “To discover what really goes on inside the belly of the media beast, read this book.” —Bill Maher “In this overflowing treasure chest of ideas, politics and cultural critiques, Kraus proves that “art is dangerous” and sometimes necessarily so.” —Publishers Weekly