Sean Landers: Cartoons

Whether you're a fan of Sean Landers's prolific, varied, purposely self-aggrandizing and simultaneously self-puncturing career or not (and no one is neutral), there's one thing that's He's wickedly funny. And nowhere is his humor sharper than in these previously uncollected drawings from 1991-92, in which a cast of art-world strivers, including gallerists, painters and groupies, parade across the page with all their hilarious insecurities on display. The most prominent form in which Landers delivers his witty apercus through these characters is the T-shirt "I used to show in the 80s"; "I went to Yale too"; or "I emerged as an artist during the Gulf War." In a drafting style that resembles a cleaned-up R. Crumb and with his trademark hand-lettered misspellings, Landers takes on all art types, exposing the shallowness of the successful artist and the flop, the egotism of the collector and critic, in sometimes bawdy and frequently laugh-out-loud satire. Amazingly, this is a book that would be equally at home in a museum restroom stall or an exhibition vitrine.