Since everyone is shitting on the New Yorker, here’s my experience with the venerable mag. I used to do illustrations for them, and the assignments used to be all over the place—I’d be hired for my concept and style, not cultural signifiers. Then something happened, and for the next year or so I was only commissioned to do portraits of (mostly Russian) conductors.

After the 6th or 7th conductor, I sent them an email, saying that I appreciate the work, but I’m really not an expert in classical music and I rarely do portraits, and above all, it would be great to go back to doing more diverse jobs, especially things to do with literature. They said great, thanks for letting us know, and never hired me for anything again.

Years later, I found out that they (allegedly) have a spreadsheet with tags like “punk,” “disability,” or “Bolivian,” so I assume that at some point someone must’ve tagged me with “Russian” (I’m not even Russian—like many Armenians my name ends with -ov) and “classical” (still no idea why, probably because my drawings back then were more elegant—see attached). So, after my email, they must’ve removed the tags, and I never came up in their art direction process.

This is all speculation, of course, but if you’ve looked through the magazine in the last few years, you would’ve noticed the exact same people doing the exact same things over and over again. I should say this is not a New Yorker issue, pretty much everyone got the same memo around the same time, and my editorial work dried up within a year. I didn’t mind, since I was pretty burned out on it, and part of me was happy to move on. That said, this homogenous and predictable wave of art direction absolutely paved the road for Ai slop, but that’s a whole other conversation…