Art in the news: David Hockney

Two days, two stories about David Hockney.  Firstly, he's been awarded the Order of Merit by the Queen, highly prestigious, and he seems to have agreed in spite of refusing previous honours and turn down an invitation to paint the Queen's portrait.

Image copied from The Guardian today.  The link to the Guardian article on this is here.

Then yesterday he's in the news again, with an implied swipe at Damien Hirst in particular, against artists who get assistants to do the tedious job of painting for them.   The Guardian article on this is here.

Hockney has a big exhibition going up at the royal academy in the spring (the RA link is here) and the publicity flyers make an unusual statement that the works are all painted by the artist, himself, personally.  The implication being that many others don't bother.  Cue ruffled feathers from several quarters.

A brave but honest comment from Hockney.  I suspect that quite a lot of non art-world people are also baffled as to how or why some famous names in art manage not to do their own work.  I thought this recently at the small show of Bridget Riley prints in Bristol, which were clearly the work of her assistants not herself.  Andy Warhol famously had a whole bevy of assistants in The Factory - and made no secret of the fact that his work was being mass-produced by others.  Lots of the 'great' classical painters had apprentices to do some at least of the work and certainly lots of the preparation and cleaning up.  Is it ok to have helpers when the process is a machine one, like screen printing?  Is it ok when the 'master' does the key bits, the drawing or whatever/?  Hirst rather huffily has been defending and been defended - but it does seem odd when some of his works, which have fetched huge prices at auction, were designed by him (e.g. the jewell encrusted skull) but executed entirely by others.

Hhmm.  Food for thought.  Not a problem I'll ever face in my own work, of course....

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