A Tribute to David Hockney (1937-2026)
My latest essay for Quillette, considers what made his seven-decade career cohere despite its seemingly restless range—pools, portraits, opera sets, iPad drawings. I trace his lifelong argument with photography’s fixed viewpoint and his insistence that painting register the way human perception actually moves through time. Hockney’s own favorite story made the case better than any critic could: a ceramic owl by Picasso, he liked to point out, contains far less visual information than a stuffed specimen, yet it captures something the stuffed bird never will—the experience of a human being looking. Everything he made afterward was an argument for that distinction. The conviction that pictures should register perception rather than mimic mechanical record is what let him move between such different work without ever really changing subjects. For Hockney looking was a discipline, and painting was still the best instrument he had for doing it. Read the full essay in Quillette.
