David Hockney, A Bigger Picture, Royal Academy London
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http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/hockney/
Hockney, with Sergeant, Lowry, and perhaps Velazquez was one my favourite artists as a teenager. I only ever looked at his paintings in a book. I still admire his unusual (in the contemporary art business) variety of styles and approaches to making pictures.
This show has got terrible reviews, which I thought meant that it would be good (I still think there are double standards, landscape paintings are judged against the very best such as Corot, Constable, Van Gogh. Other art such as video, spots, etc is discussed in terms of its content, as though there are no good ideas such as philosophy, literature, movies to compare conceptualish art to?).
Having run the gauntlet of the frenzied bourgeoisie (I HAVE TRIED TO print this ticket, I AM NOT WAITING any longer, angry middle class art lovers with gritted teeth are vile, but I guess we hold them to higher standards than angry poor people) I did my best to prove the critics wrong. I thought of the anger Guston's figurative paintings had first aroused, I thought of ugly beautiful, I tried, I sat down, I went back and forth trying to appreciate this show.
I failed. THIS IS A VERY UGLY SHOW. It is a visual assault. Mostly it looks like someone who has wasted much expensive paint and canvas. Too much shiny Michael Harding. Too many colour contrasts. Too many dashes for leaves and flowers. Hockney: Leaves have shapes. There is no sense of light or space. The paint is really ugly. The same thing over and over and over. Why not get a bigger van if you want to do big plein air landscapes and stop having these annoying breaks in the paintings. Hockney is very good at drawing and can't paint, Picasso had the same problem, but solved it by not trying so hard and being a genius.
When you get to the HD video section of the same landscape it is like getting off a plane and breathing fresh air. Wow, beautiful leaves, and light, all with distinct shapes, not horrible bits of patterned paint. A big crowd is gathered round the tv sets. The printed out Ipad drawings are so kitsch as to be almost good, like fake paintings printed on canvas.
People do seem happy in the exhibition, they wander round with smiles admiring the pretty landscapes. People want beauty and things that are obviously beautiful. Perhaps this is Hockney's big joke, a massive show at the Royal Academy, bastion of what's left of the muddled classes institutional delight in figurative painting, of nice landscapes which is in fact meant to be REPULSIVELY ugly and yet no-one, except elitist critics, notices or cares..
Hockney, with Sergeant, Lowry, and perhaps Velazquez was one my favourite artists as a teenager. I only ever looked at his paintings in a book. I still admire his unusual (in the contemporary art business) variety of styles and approaches to making pictures.
This show has got terrible reviews, which I thought meant that it would be good (I still think there are double standards, landscape paintings are judged against the very best such as Corot, Constable, Van Gogh. Other art such as video, spots, etc is discussed in terms of its content, as though there are no good ideas such as philosophy, literature, movies to compare conceptualish art to?).
Having run the gauntlet of the frenzied bourgeoisie (I HAVE TRIED TO print this ticket, I AM NOT WAITING any longer, angry middle class art lovers with gritted teeth are vile, but I guess we hold them to higher standards than angry poor people) I did my best to prove the critics wrong. I thought of the anger Guston's figurative paintings had first aroused, I thought of ugly beautiful, I tried, I sat down, I went back and forth trying to appreciate this show.
I failed. THIS IS A VERY UGLY SHOW. It is a visual assault. Mostly it looks like someone who has wasted much expensive paint and canvas. Too much shiny Michael Harding. Too many colour contrasts. Too many dashes for leaves and flowers. Hockney: Leaves have shapes. There is no sense of light or space. The paint is really ugly. The same thing over and over and over. Why not get a bigger van if you want to do big plein air landscapes and stop having these annoying breaks in the paintings. Hockney is very good at drawing and can't paint, Picasso had the same problem, but solved it by not trying so hard and being a genius.
When you get to the HD video section of the same landscape it is like getting off a plane and breathing fresh air. Wow, beautiful leaves, and light, all with distinct shapes, not horrible bits of patterned paint. A big crowd is gathered round the tv sets. The printed out Ipad drawings are so kitsch as to be almost good, like fake paintings printed on canvas.
People do seem happy in the exhibition, they wander round with smiles admiring the pretty landscapes. People want beauty and things that are obviously beautiful. Perhaps this is Hockney's big joke, a massive show at the Royal Academy, bastion of what's left of the muddled classes institutional delight in figurative painting, of nice landscapes which is in fact meant to be REPULSIVELY ugly and yet no-one, except elitist critics, notices or cares..