ABOVE: two of Richard McGuire’s new narrative-driven spot drawings for The New Yorker

This probably wasn’t keeping anyone awake at night, but did anyone else not know that The New Yorker had been reprinting those little drawings throughout the magazine on a six-month rotation? This piece from the New York Times quotes editor David Remnick: “We’ve been running some of the same windmills, toasters, umbrellas and shoes in six-month rotation for a long time.”

Anyway, no more: with its 80th anniversary issue on February 18, the magazine has turfed out the old collection of tiny doodles that appear throughout its pages, and replaced them with new ones by some new artists. And no longer are they random line-drawings of hats or flowers—now they have narratives attached, and come in series of six to ten, so you get a progression of the little story as you read.

These drawings are probably not leading to huge paydays for the artists who draw them, but it’s nice to see The New Yorker giving people some work to do. The Times story also includes a slideshow of one of the new doodle series.

The New York Times > Talk of the Town (Make That Whisper)

The Scotsman reports that European art dealers are steamed about a new EU law that will skim up to four per cent off of the purchase price of resale art and give it to the original artist. The move is designed to reimburse artists for the maddening phenomenon of watching their art inflate in value long after it’s left their studios.

Resellers and dealers apparently say that the art will just flee to New York or Geneva (Switzerland, always the non-joiner-inner, is not a member of the EU), although The Scotsman does not bother us with frills like quoting an actual art dealer. An older article from The Telegraph does, however: the chairman of the British Art Market Federation calls it “the most significant threat that faces the London art market by far.”

He also points out that since the “droit de suite” levy remains in effect for 70 years after an artist’s death, most of the money ends up going to already-wealthy descendents of the artist who have already made small fortunes auctioning off daddy’s doodlesome shopping lists and other ephemera.

Scotsman.com News - Latest News - Art Levy ‘Will Destroy Jobs’

[In other news: apologies for not posting yesterday; in penance, look for double the posts today. That is to say, two. It’ll be up later.]