Apologies for the pun but David Hockney, Art-God and all round hero, has been grumping about again. Not that I can blame him: not only do I admire his work, his radical libertarian instincts are right up my street.
What’s got his goat this time is the plans by Angela Eagle to ban drawings of children. Hockney points out that this makes a good deal of great art child-porn, to which Eagle replied that the law wouldn’t be used to ban legitimate works of art. So, not only (in words borrowed from Proudhon) are we ‘watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, [and] commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so’, those same creatures are now going to decide what is ‘art’ and what isn’t. Zut Alors.
More Hockneyisms
On Gordon Brown:
“a dreary atheistic Calvinistic prig, who I’m sure will never be elected in England. He goes along with a ‘health lobby’ whose view of life itself I detest.”
On Cannabis:
“Why is the stuff still illegal? I assume it’s the power of the alcohol lobby being behind most things. Alcohol has damaged and killed friends of mine, but I’ve never known anyone harmed by the weed, whose relaxing pleasure I have enjoyed for 40 years.”
On Climate Change:
“Oh no. Here’s another hair-shirt person coming towards me and telling me to ride a bicycle. I blame computers. They can make predictive models of anything, and tell us we’re all heading towards doom. But in our grandparents’ day, what do you think people were worrying about? Hellfire and eternal damnation caused by our bad conduct. Global warming has just replaced God. Something to feel guilty about. The new religion.”
On refusing a Knighthood:
“I don’t value prizes of any sort. I value my friends. Prizes of any sort are a bit suspect.”
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June 9, 2008 at 4:21 pm
tim f
“commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so’, those same creatures are now going to decide what is ‘art’ and what isn’t”
Of course, it should be self-selected bourgeois committees stuffed with people who’ve never done a day’s work in their lives that decide what art is, instead.
I value closing a loophole which will bang up a few paedophiles more highly than some conosseiur’s right to have paintings of naked children in his house.
Frankly I’m suspicious about what the motives might have been, in the days before photographs, for an aristrocrat to commission paintings of naked children.
June 9, 2008 at 8:23 pm
colenotdole
I’m gathering that your barbs are intended to class me as bourgeois and make the assumption that I’ve never done a days work in my life. I would beg to differ on both counts, but I shan’t engage with that argument here.
I’d rather like to take issue with the concept of a committee or anyone deciding what art is: that wasn’t what I was arguing. Art is art: it is not up to you or me to define it or to permit it to be labelled as worthy. That there is good and bad art is unquestionable, but the right to produce bad art is bound up in the right to expression.
As for naked children, they have been used as models for cherubin in religious representations for centuries. So I ask you this: is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel obscene?