Politics & Power Quote by David Hockney

Hockney’s line lands like a brushstroke of defiance: intimate, sensory, and stubbornly ungovernable. He’s not really making a medical claim about nicotine; he’s making an artistic claim about sovereignty. “Smoking calms me down” frames the habit as self-regulation, a private technology for mood and rhythm. “It’s enjoyable” is almost aggressively plain, a refusal to dress pleasure up in justification. Then he pivots to the real target: the paternal state that rebrands risk as a public crisis and, in the process, starts managing temperament itself.

The subtext is less “let me smoke” than “stop shrinking adult life into approved behaviors.” Hockney’s generation watched governments expand from regulating harm to regulating atmospheres: where you can do something, who must be protected from seeing it, how desire gets priced, taxed, and shamed. For an artist whose work is about perception - what we notice, what we frame, what we allow into the picture - the idea of politicians deciding “what is exciting” reads as aesthetic censorship by other means. It’s not puritanism exactly; it’s risk management dressed as virtue.

Context matters: Hockney has long been publicly pro-smoking, even as culture pivoted hard toward clean-air consensus. In that climate, the statement becomes a provocation aimed at the new moral mainstream. He’s betting on a classic liberal argument - adults, consequences, choice - but he sharpens it into something more personal: the right to small, flawed pleasures that make a life feel like one’s own.