Picturing Smartness: Cartoons in the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Esquire in the Age of Cultural Celebrities

In this article, I examine the literary single-panel cartoons and caricatures in smart magazines the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Esquire, which reflect each magazine’s bibliographic code, emphasizing a burgeoning “smart” audience, and efforts to promote popular cultural tastes and celebrities. While Bourdieu discusses the circulation of symbolic capital of the avant-garde, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Esquire market to a wider audience, conflating economic, social, and cultural capital by their published contents and creating an omnivorous readership that recognizes the consecrated modern cultural celebrities while eschewing—and laughing at—the exclusive elitism of other publications.