"A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light"
About this Quote
A belief, Hockney implies, isn’t a cozy opinion you keep on a shelf. It’s an instrument: clean, decisive, and a little terrifying. The guillotine is doing double duty here. It’s weighty in the obvious sense - metal, history, gravity - but it’s also “light” in the way a mechanism can feel effortless once it’s set in motion. That paradox is the point: beliefs can feel morally substantial while operating with the frictionless certainty of a lever.
Coming from Hockney, an artist who’s spent decades arguing (sometimes playfully, sometimes pugnaciously) about how we see - from perspective to photography to the legitimacy of new tools - the line reads as a warning against aesthetic dogma. Art history is full of guillotines disguised as “taste”: rules about what counts as serious, what counts as modern, what counts at all. Once you accept them, they don’t just guide your eye; they sever alternatives. One clean drop and whole ways of looking are dismissed as naive, vulgar, or “not art.”
The subtext is that belief is attractive precisely because it simplifies. It narrows the world into a readable shape and, in exchange, asks you to stop noticing what doesn’t fit. The guillotine metaphor smuggles in the crowd, too - public certainty, ideological fashion, the righteous pleasure of a swift verdict. Hockney’s line lands because it treats conviction as both burden and shortcut: the thing you carry, and the thing that does your thinking for you.
Coming from Hockney, an artist who’s spent decades arguing (sometimes playfully, sometimes pugnaciously) about how we see - from perspective to photography to the legitimacy of new tools - the line reads as a warning against aesthetic dogma. Art history is full of guillotines disguised as “taste”: rules about what counts as serious, what counts as modern, what counts at all. Once you accept them, they don’t just guide your eye; they sever alternatives. One clean drop and whole ways of looking are dismissed as naive, vulgar, or “not art.”
The subtext is that belief is attractive precisely because it simplifies. It narrows the world into a readable shape and, in exchange, asks you to stop noticing what doesn’t fit. The guillotine metaphor smuggles in the crowd, too - public certainty, ideological fashion, the righteous pleasure of a swift verdict. Hockney’s line lands because it treats conviction as both burden and shortcut: the thing you carry, and the thing that does your thinking for you.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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