Cutting the Mustard

After I wrote the post about the 2013 CJA annual awards, 'Got to Find Me a Chess Blog!', I started to wonder if there really were no better candidates for the art award, pictured in that post. An animal with a chess piece on its nose, be it rhino or hippo, just doesn't cut the mustard.

I spent 15 minutes leafing through a year's worth of Chess Life (CL), starting from May 2012, and found at least a half-dozen images that were 'artier' than the CJA winner. My favorite, from the December 2012 CL, is pictured below. I should mention that the CL issues through July 2012 were monocolor between the covers, and I didn't pay much attention to the interior artwork.

Caption: 'The 2012 Chess Journalist of the Year, FM Mike Klein, a frequent contributor to Chess Life and Chess Life Online. Photo by Sean Busher'

There is a certain irony here in that the photo (it looks more like a painting to me) was used to illustrate a one page article on the CJA's 2012 awards.

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Later: The image was also used in the Summer/Autumn 2012 edition of the CJA's The Chess Journalist, p.13, where I learned,

OUR CHESS JOURNALIST OF THE YEAR, FM MIKE, ALSO HAPPENED to have been the subject some years ago of a work by conceptual commercial artist Sean Busher. We appreciate Sean Busher’s kind permission to reproduce his color photograph in black and white in our centerfold. Check out his other fantastic work at http://www.seanbusher.com. As for this image: Is it humor? A cautionary tale about chess hustling among toughs? Would you take lessons from this fellow? You decide.

If I get to decide, then it's humor.