Creativity Quote by David Hockney

Hockney takes a medium built for mass sameness and reframes it as participatory art. “Television is becoming a collage” isn’t nostalgia for channel-surfing; it’s a painter’s way of noticing that authorship has leaked from the studio into the living room. Collage is the key word: not a linear narrative but a stitched-together experience where meaning comes from adjacency, interruption, and the viewer’s hand. By “you move through them,” he makes the remote control into scissors and glue.

The subtext is quietly radical for its time. Broadcast TV once promised a shared national feed, a synchronized culture. Hockney sees that promise eroding under abundance: as channels multiply, the “program” becomes less what’s on and more the path you take. Everyone “sees something a bit different” sounds democratic, but it also carries a mild тревога: if each person assembles their own version of reality, the common reference points that make publics possible start to thin out.

Context matters. Hockney has long been obsessed with how technologies teach us to see: photography’s single-point perspective, cubism’s multiple viewpoints, his later experiments with iPads and multi-camera video. This quote sits on that same continuum. He’s not scolding television as low culture; he’s elevating it to an aesthetic problem: fragmentation as a new normal, the viewer as editor, and the image-world as a set of raw materials. It’s an artist spotting the early logic of the feed before the feed fully arrived.