Politics & Power Quote by Brad Holland

A working illustrator calling illustrators the last people who don’t “seem” to be artists is a beautifully barbed act of insider sabotage. Brad Holland is pointing at a cultural glitch: illustration is everywhere in American life yet routinely treated as mere decoration, a service industry for other people’s ideas. The line turns on that slippery phrase “seem not to be.” He’s not denying illustrators have artistry; he’s indicting the way the market, museums, and media optics strip them of it.

The joke lands because it reverses the expected hierarchy. In a country that increasingly brands everything as creative - the entrepreneur as visionary, the influencer as curator, the corporation as storyteller - the one profession built on making images gets relegated to “commercial.” America loves the romance of the artist but distrusts the worker. Illustrators are workers: deadline-driven, brief-bound, paid to solve someone else’s communication problem. Holland’s subtext is that our definition of “artist” is less about making art than about performing autonomy.

Context matters: Holland came up during the late-20th-century editorial illustration boom, when magazines gave illustrators real cultural power, then watched that ecosystem shrink and platform algorithms flatten visual labor into content. His quip is both lament and dare. If everyone gets to be called an artist now, maybe the title has become a lifestyle adjective - and the people doing the most disciplined visual thinking are the ones denied it.