Is David Hockney a fraud ?
I watched him being interviewed on television last night. He
appeared to be the archetypal Yorkshireman, flat cap and broad accent.
He sat in the glow of the praise the interviewer heaped on him, a benign
smile on his face as if to say I'v heard it all
before.
Art is in the eye of the beholder. Rembrandt, Michael Angelo,Titian all painted in great detail, providing
reproductions of scenes actual and mystical which we still stare in awe.
Then the Impressionists Cezanne, Van Gogh, Pissarro with their use of
colour
and texture to often blur reality and find some other inference to what
we see around us.
The Modernist School. Picasso with his Cubist rendering of shape, the Surrealism of Chagall with his more fluid shapes.
Paul Klee with his explosion of colour to define the emotional. Abstract
Expressionism, Pop Art, Post Modernism they all moved further
away from an artists depiction of reality into a world where it was
often up to the viewer to make out of the picture what they wanted.
Somewhere along the way came the impostors who with the backing of the Art Critique made enormous claims on our
credulity. Tracy Emin with her unmade bed is for me a bridge too far.
She seems to simply capitalise on a market that has invented itself to
provide people who have too much money and not enough sense, a place to
buy and display for the unique pleasure of saying "I have one of those and you don't".
Hockney is somewhere between Pop Art and a sort of Impressionist in that on face value his pictures depict the world
around us but with a twist. His "Big Splash" showing a splash of water
coming up from a swimming pool simply reflects his love for California
where he lives part of the time and the "Big Tree" which reflects his
roots in Yorkshire. Neither painting is specifically gifted in my
opinion, neither precise nor evolving into something which needs
interpretation, it's more blurred than factual and one
is left wondering if it isn't the work of someone who can't paint or draw but has somehow become iconic through no fault of his own.
I attended the Bradford Technical Collage and across the road was
the lessor building of the Bradford Art Collage. We used to think of the
arty types as lesser beings than we of a technical 'engineering' bent
but Hockney has had the last laugh. Although
we both walked down Great Horton Rd, he no doubt on the other pavement,
our paths since then diverged. He went on to become wealthy and famous
and I remained unnoticed but no flat cap can dissuade me that his wearing of it is as fraudulent as are his paintings.
I agree with you. Hockey thinks it's all a great joke. He turns out any old daubs and his iconic status guarantee sycophantic praise. He has no eye, can't paint and the stuff he does on his iPad is insultingly bad.
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