"We live in an age where the artist is forgotten. He is a researcher. I see myself that way"
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Hockney isn’t mourning the “forgotten artist” so much as weaponizing the disappearance. If the culture has stopped seeing the artist as a romantic genius - a lone soul making beauty on instinct - he’s fine with that. He slides into a different job title: researcher. It’s a demotion in glamour, a promotion in seriousness.
The line works because it quietly recodes what counts as art. “Forgotten” implies a public that once knew how to read artists and now prefers celebrity, content, or brand. Hockney’s counter is to claim the authority of method. A researcher tests, repeats, documents, revises. That maps neatly onto his career: the obsessive returns to perception, the long study of how we actually see, the interest in optics and photography, the willingness to use iPads and printers without treating technology as either salvation or betrayal. He’s arguing that the studio is a lab, not a confessional.
Subtext: stop asking for the artist’s “meaning” and start asking what problem he’s solving. It’s also a sly defense against a market that turns artists into signatures. Research can’t be reduced to a logo; it demands time, process, and evidence. At a moment when images are frictionless and infinite, Hockney insists on slow looking as a form of inquiry. He doesn’t reject art’s mystery; he reframes mystery as a question worth investigating, not a pose.
The line works because it quietly recodes what counts as art. “Forgotten” implies a public that once knew how to read artists and now prefers celebrity, content, or brand. Hockney’s counter is to claim the authority of method. A researcher tests, repeats, documents, revises. That maps neatly onto his career: the obsessive returns to perception, the long study of how we actually see, the interest in optics and photography, the willingness to use iPads and printers without treating technology as either salvation or betrayal. He’s arguing that the studio is a lab, not a confessional.
Subtext: stop asking for the artist’s “meaning” and start asking what problem he’s solving. It’s also a sly defense against a market that turns artists into signatures. Research can’t be reduced to a logo; it demands time, process, and evidence. At a moment when images are frictionless and infinite, Hockney insists on slow looking as a form of inquiry. He doesn’t reject art’s mystery; he reframes mystery as a question worth investigating, not a pose.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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