There's only one most-licensed, most-reproduced New Yorker cartoon of all time, and there's only one original of that cartoon:
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| "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." Peter Steiner Original art The New Yorker, July 5, 1993, p. 61 |
Peter Steiner's now-classic cartoon ran in issue of July 5, 1993 when the internet felt relatively new.
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| "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." Peter Steiner Original art The New Yorker, July 5, 1993, p. 61 |
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| Verso |
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| Peter Steiner Heritage Auctions listing accessed September 16, 2023, nineteen days before the sale |
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| Peter Steiner Heritage Auctions item description |
Bidding opened at $20,000 with an estimate of $40,000 to $60,000. The day prior to yesterday's auction, no bids had been placed.
But as always the iconic drawing received a lot of publicity. It was on the cover of the Heritage catalogue:
When the hammer dropped yesterday, the bidding had reached $140,000 plus a $35,000 buyer's premium. That's a higher realized price by far than any work of original New Yorker art yet documented on this blog. My guess—and it's just a guess—is that the competing bidders were, for the most part, not the usual cartoon and illustration collectors, but tech millionaires competing to claim a cultural touchstone of the internet age.
In 1993, the internet was always capitalized.  |
| "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." Peter Steiner The New Yorker, July 5, 1993, p. 61 |
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| "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." Peter Steiner Original art The New Yorker, July 5, 1993, p. 61 |
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| A spot drawing by Benoît van Innis and a cartoon by Peter Steiner |
Heritage arranged a discussion of the cartoon with the artist and Bob Mankoff, The New Yorker's former cartoon editor (who was not the one to buy the cartoon for the magazine—that was Lee Lorenz) but had much to do with licensing it.
Meanwhile, that other drawing in the magazine's spread, of an unlaced shoe, is quite forgotten by history. I doubt that many remember this or any spot drawing for that matter . . .
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| Shoe spot Benoît van Innis |
Note: There was also a redraw by Peter Steiner of his classic cartoon available from Curated Cartoons for $1,500. It sold within an hour of the Heritage lot. You can see that this redraw is pretty close, but it's by no means identical to the published version. See the treatment of the windows across the street, for example.
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| Peter Steiner Curated Cartoons item description |
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