The first time we featured an illustration by John Cuneo on the cover of the magazine was the May 2018 issue. Amuse-bouche features a gardener on her knees blithely planting a sapling while dozens of woodland critters emerge from the trees, waiting to pounce on their next meal. It reflects the many hours Cuneo has spent contemplating the futility of gardening at his Woodstock home. “It is an eternally optimistic thing to try and make anything grow here with all the animals,” he told us in 2018. “I always think about it when I see homes with fortresses of chains, electricity, and barbed wire. But I am heartened by that kind of naive optimism—it’s endearing.”
When Cuneo approached us looking for a home for the piece, an orphaned New Yorker submission—we jumped at the chance. Look: We’re not proud. We’ll take sloppy seconds if we get to showcase work like this. The colorful sweetness of Amuse-bouche is a slight departure for Cuneo, whose illustrations are a masterclass in delightful discomfort—his scratchy, acerbic lines lay bare the absurdity of the human condition, equal parts tender and brutal. Whether skewering cultural norms or embracing the grotesque, his work is a Rorschach test for your tolerance of raw honesty. Just follow the illustrator on Instagram—@johncuneo3—and you’ll see the visceral cross-section of his mind on display there.
Cuneo is compulsive about drawing, so Instagram is a near-perfect vehicle for the illustrator’s noncommissioned work. “I’m the guy who walks around with a sketchpad or a card in his pocket in case he needs to draw something. I draw all the time,” he told us in 2023, and said of Instagram: “It’s a place to put all this stuff.” He posts almost every day, skewering male fantasies, domestic life, and the political scene with sketches that feature more penises than some porno films. “I get away with an alarming amount of genitalia for some reason,” he said. But all that libidinous energy is a double-edged pen. “I’ve drawn myself into a corner,” he said. “If I do a normal drawing, people ask, ‘Where’s the penis?'”
It was on Instagram in June of 2023 when I spotted his illustration The Messenger. In it, a woman leans over a man drawing in a notebook in a coffee shop and soliloquizes on the death of the artist in the age of artificial intelligence: “Hell, my kid could do that. No really—he’s got an AI image generator. He can just text ‘prompt’ of your stupid drawing, and he can say he wants it in your style, and so the program will harvest and collate and absorb thousands of your copyrighted drawings, and then its neural networks will get busy. In seconds it’ll start spittin’ out endless variations and equivalents of your sad little sketch, only without the muffin crumbs and coffee stains. In other words, the party’s over, pen-boy.” (That last phrase—”the party’s over, pen-boy”—is devastating in its self-lacerating gallows humor. As Freud noted, laughter is just humanity’s way of coping with the unspeakable pain of everyday life.)
As you might recall, June of 2023 was just six months after the launch of ChatGPT, the first large language model AI available to the public. The Messenger is an incisive and hilarious peek under the hood at artists’ anxieties facing the existential threat of AI and some people’s seeming willingness to consign human-made art to the dustbin of history and embrace our new artmaking robot overlords.
In short, it’s brilliant. But don’t take my word on it. The Messenger, which we featured on the cover of the July 2023 issue, was awarded a gold medal in the 67th Society of Illustrators Annual competition. The competition is open to artists worldwide, and thousands of entries are considered by a jury of 50 industry professionals, which include renowned illustrators, art directors, and designers. Cuneo has won multiple Society of Illustrators medals to date, and he’s in (ahem) illustrious company: recent winners include Steve Brodner, Mark Stamaty, Anna and Elana Balbusso, Marc Burckhardt, and Saugerties resident Chris Buzelli, whose Little Covid Prince appeared on the May 2020 cover of this magazine. Cuneo’s original illustration will be part of “Illustrators 67,” an exhibition at the Museum of American Illustration at the Society of Illustrators in Manhattan from March 8 to April 12.
Kudos to John Cuneo for snagging gold, and thanks again to him and to other artists of all types who continue to make work centering human concerns. As author Joanna Maciejewska noted in a tweet that went viral last year: “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”
AI might pump out pretty pictures with algorithmic precision, but it will never replicate the frailty and fire of the human touch. Art is not just the finished image; it’s the coffee stains, the tortured drafts, the years spent wrestling with self-doubt, and the horrific struggle to establish a human self. Cuneo’s pen scratches at the truth, revealing raw, tender humanity in a way no neural network can. Sure, AI can mimic a style, but it can’t capture the soul behind the work. It lacks the sweat, the struggle, the humanity to imbue an image with our messy, unquantifiable essence. Art isn’t just about output—it’s a dialogue between creator and viewer, an unspoken contract of vulnerability and risk. Here’s to the risk takers.
This article appears in February 2025.
