The Academy Blog

What makes a picture funny? Can satire happen without words? Ken Johnson, former art critic for The New York Times, and Robert Mankoff, cartoons editor of The New Yorker, hold an freewheeling discussion on visual art and humor.

Ken Johnson grew up in Maine and graduated from Brown University in 1976 with a B.A. in art. He earned a masters degree in studio art with a concentration in painting at the State University of New York at Albany in 1977.  For the next five years he worked as a technician in the painting department of an art conservation laboratory operated by the New York State Department of Historic Sites in Waterford, NY. In 1983, he started  writing art reviews for the Albany Times Union newspaper and for other local publications in the Albany region where he  lived from 1977 to 2001 (in Troy from the early 80s on). In 1987 he began writing articles on contemporary artists for the now defunct Arts Magazine, and a year later he moved on to Art in America for which he wrote reviews and articles regularly for the next nine years. In 1997 he began writing reviews for The New York Times, and continued to do so until Sept. 2006, when he took a job as the chief art critic for the Boston Globe. After a year in Boston, he returned to New York and to writing art criticism for the Times until the Fall of 2016. . He began producing an online comic called Ball and Cone (ballandcone.tumblr.com) in 2013. He has lived in Flushing, Queens since 2001. In 2011, his book “Are You Experienced? How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art” was published by Prestel Books.

New Yorker Cartoon Editor, cartoonist, and author Bob Mankoff not only knows how to make people laugh but can show you how to do it, too. Existing in a world of lines and panels, ink and punch lines, Mankoff pores over hundreds of drawings to decide which will get a spot in the coveted pages of the New Yorker. As Cartoon Editor, he upholds a near century old tradition of connecting millions of readers through the power of humor.

Bob’s career started, unexpectedly, by quitting a Ph.D program in experimental psychology at The City University of New York in 1974. Shortly after, he began submitting cartoons to the New Yorker. Three years and over 2,000 cartoons later, he finally made the magazine and has since published over 950 cartoons. His story and day-to-day at the magazine were the focus of the 2015 HBO documentary Very Semi-Serious.
In 1997, The New Yorker named Bob Cartoon Editor. Spending his days analyzing, critiquing, and selecting the magazine’s cartoons, he mentors cartoonists, new and old, towards the laughs readers expect. In 2005, he helped start the “New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest.” With over 2.7 million entries to date, the contest receives 5,000 reader submissions a week. Lately Bob has partnered with data scientists to explore the using this data to develop algorithms to assist in the judgment of the entries to the contest and with this information evaluate the potential for computers to generate humorous caption on their own.

How About Never – Is Never Good For You?: My Life In Cartoons, Bob’s New York Times bestselling memoir, was published in 2014. The Washington Post said, “Mankoff’s deep understanding of humor, both its power and its practice, is the live wire that crackles through his book…It’s also an enormous window into the mystery and alchemy behind the creation and selection of New Yorker cartoons.”

The author of The Naked Cartoonist: A New Way to Enhance Your Creativity, Bob has taught classes a The University of Michigan and Swarthmore in the psychology of humor, and led workshops on the creative process.

Throughout the 1980s, Bob catalogued and digitized every New Yorker cartoon, a project that became the Cartoon Bank, the world’s most successful cartoon licensing platform.

In addition to appearances on 60 Minutes and Charlie Rose, Bob hosts the New Yorker web series “The Cartoon Lounge,” where he takes viewers inside the process of selecting and producing the magazine’s illustrations.

Panel discussion about the exhibition Piss and Vinegar: Two Generations of Provocateurs moderated by Ken Johnson and featuring artists Natalie Frank, Hilary Harkness, and Peter Saul.

Matthew Deleget is an artist, curator, and arts worker. Matthew has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, including solo and group exhibitions in the US, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. His work was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial by Michelle Grabner at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His additional museum exhibitions include MoMA/P.S.1 (Long Island City, NY); Bronx Museum of the Arts (Bronx, NY); Herbert F. Johnson Museum (Ithaca, NY); Bass Museum of Art (Miami, FL); and Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (Indianapolis, IN).

In 2003, Matthew co-founded MINUS SPACE , a gallery based in Brooklyn, NY, specializing in contemporary reductive abstract art, and represents pioneering emerging and established artists and estates from the United States, Europe, South America, and Australia. Since 2006, he has organized more than 60 solo and group exhibitions at both MINUS SPACE’s gallery in Dumbo, Brooklyn, as well as other collaborating venues on the national and international levels, including in Mexico, Belgium, Australia, and New Zealand.

Matthew’s work is represented by Alejandra von Hartz Gallery (Miami, FL) and Dr. Julius | AP (Berlin, Germany). He teaches in the MFA Fine Arts Department at the School of Visual Arts, NY. He holds an MFA in Painting and an MS in Theory, Criticism and History of Art, Design and Architecture from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, and a BA in Art and German from Wabash College, Crawfordsville, IN. Matthew lives with his wife, artist Rossana Martinez, and son Mateo in Brooklyn, NY.

Franklin Boyd integrates multiple perspectives on the art market: attorney, art finance professor, collector, board member and advisor. As the founder of Xipsy, an art database that facilitates contractual resale rights for artists and galleries, she is interested in trying new approaches to old problems and looking at how market players can work collaboratively rather than in opposition.

Kimberly Drew (@museummammy) received her B.A. from Smith College in Art History and African-American Studies, with a concentration in Museum Studies. An avid lover of black culture and art, Drew first experienced the art world as an intern in the Director’s Office of The Studio Museum in Harlem. Her time at the Studio Museum inspired her to start the Tumblr blog Black Contemporary Art, sparking her interest in social media.

Since starting her blog, Drew has worked for Hyperallergic, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Lehmann Maupin. She has delivered lectures and participated in panel discussions at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Basel Miami Beach, Moogfest, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Brooklyn Museum and elsewhere. Drew is currently the Social Media Manager at The Met, was recently honored by AIR Gallery as the recipient of their inaugural Feminist Curator Award and was selected as one of the YBCA100 by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Hrag Vartanian is editor-in-chief and co-founder of Hyperallergic, a publication he created in 2009 in response to the changes in the art world, publishing, and the distribution of information. Breaking news, award-winning reporting, informed opinions, and quality conversations about art have helped Hyperallergic reach over 1 million readers a month. Hrag launched the Hyperallergic podcast in 2016 which travels around the globe to uncover the evolving world of art.

In addition, he has curated projects, exhibitions and has organized public events since 1997. Highlights of his curatorial efforts include exhibitions at BAM, Storefront Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, and #theSocialGraph at Outpost, the world’s first multi-disciplinary exhibition of social media-related art in 2010. He has visited many universities and colleges as a visiting critic including RISD, Brooklyn College, UC Davis, Pratt, Columbia and UNLV, as well as moderated panel discussions and juried exhibitions for various organizations, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and Chautauqua Institution. Beyond his writing, he is an avid photographer and collector of photographs. He is committed to serious, playful, and radical storytelling that pushes the boundaries of writing.

Jason Andrew is an independent scholar, curator, and producer. A prominent figure in the Brooklyn art scene, Mr. Andrew is the co-founder and director of Norte Maar, a non-profit with a mission to encourage, promote and present collaborative projects in the arts.

Guarding against special interests in any particular style or genre, his curatorial projects bridge gaps left in art history and reflect the creative imagination of the past, present and future. Mr. Andrew is a patron of young artists and consultant to collectors. He frequently lectures on the creative imagination and its relationship to collaboration within the various disciplines of visual, literary and the performing arts.
In 2014, Mr. Andrew was included in Brooklyn Magazine’s Top 100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture. His curatorial projects got him voted “Best Exhibitionist” by the Village Voice (2011), and his promotion of cross disciplinary arts got him featured in L Magazine’s article “Who Made the New Brooklyn,” (2011). His exhibitions have been critically reviewed by Artforum, Art in America, Art News, and The New York Times among others.

Specializing in the field of Post War American Art, Mr. Andrew is the Curator/Manager of the Estate of American Abstract Expressionist painter Jack Tworkov. He has organized countless exhibitions and lectured extensively on the artist and his contemporaries including the first retrospective of the artist’s work in New York City at the UBS Art Gallery in 2009. Andrew has published extensively on the artist and his contemporaries and is currently editing the catalogue raisonné of paintings by Jack Tworkov. Concurrently he is working with the Estate of Elizabeth Murray.

Scott Rothkopf is the Deputy Director for Programs and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He joined the Whitney’s staff in 2009 as curator and in that role has organized Wade Guyton OS (2012) and Glenn Ligon: AMERICA (2011), which traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Rothkopf co-curated the permanent collection exhibitions Sinister Pop (2012, with Donna De Salvo) and Singular Visions (2010, with Dana Miller) and jointly oversees the Whitney’s Painting and Sculpture Acquisition Committee with De Salvo. Rothkopf also curated Jeff Koons: A Retrospective (2014), the last exhibition at the Breuer building, which traveled internationally to the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. He was a member of the Core Team which planned America Is Hard to See (2015), the Whitney’s inaugural exhibition in its new building downtown. This year, Rothkopf has co-curated Open Plan: Andrea Fraser (with Laura Phipps), Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection (with Dana Miller), and Virginia Overton: Sculpture Gardens (with Laura Phipps) at the Whitney.