Hockney Snipes at Hirst, Says Bring Back Smoking, Boozing: Martin Gayford

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-06/hockney-snipes-at-hirst-says-bring-back-boozing-martin-gayford.html

Artists are useful to society, David Hockney suggested to me last year, because they are natural intellectual rebels.

“That’s why you need lots of artists, and all kinds of artists,” he said over lunch at his house in Bridlington. “They don’t all have to be painters. Artists look at life from another angle. People who can see things at a slightly different angle, don’t we need that?”

That might not be true of all artists, though it’s certainly the case with Hockney. He is, as he says, “a bit of a propagandist.” Readers of the Guardian newspaper regularly find contributions from him on the letters page about such matters as the use of the camera obscura by old masters and the case for smoking. He recently ignited controversy with what sounded like a dig at Damien Hirst’s factory system of producing art.

A minor, humorous branch of Hockney’s work consists of what, for want of a better term, you may call “word art.” An example from a few years ago consisted of a placard, such as that held by a demonstrator at a protest, reading “Stop Bossiness Now!” Another, more recent, takes the form of an official notice of the kind that may be found on a cigarette packet: “Death Awaits You Even If You Do Not Smoke.” He had a T-shirt printed with the words, “I know I’m Right -- D Hockney,” which friends used to say was characteristic of him.


"The Road across the Wolds" (1997) by David Hockney, in "David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture" at the Royal Academy.