Just been reading thru the previous posts and also have just checked out art works by both artists and have to say that personally - and I think that point has come out about art and always should, that art can only be judged by yourself to yourself - that I personally prefer Hirst's art work hands down over Hockney's. Hirst uses imagination in his installations and real emotion and colour in his paintings. I find Hockney's style of painting so much more stilted and frozen, flat and lifeless. But that is just my own point of view.
However, I don't feel the need to justify that point of view to anyone or to try and change their mind over it - each to their own. That is the whole point of art and I love artists who shake up the rarefied realms of the 'official' art world and those who can manage to make a fortune, at times peddling crap (literally), to that world, all kudos to them.They make people stop and really think about what they do and don't like about art, hopefully by themselves but too often led by the media's point of view.
Dali was a great example of an artist with huge technical skills who stuck two fingers up at the establishment when criticised for wanting to make money from his art work in his lifetime and not waiting until he was dead. He was lambasted for taking on ad works for cash despite the idea turning into one of his most glorious paintings.- 'Swans reflected as Elephants' - originally designed as an ad idea for Air India.
I wish more artists would come out all guns blazing even if some of the results I consider to be trash - at times I just like the idea. God knows how it has changed art and our perception of it over the centuries. Without new ideas and mediums and artists pushing boundaries, we would all be stuck looking a flat, perspective-less religious painting of the middle ages.
Dali's private gallery of master pieces was a great example of scoffing at the idea of revering artists' work due to who they were - he had a whole gallery hung with master pieces and enjoyed taking rich people round to drool over the art work - it only came out later that they were all fakes commissioned by Dali to laugh at these people and their snobbery.
I like art that makes me stop and think, sometimes catch my breath, other times those that make me laugh at their audacity or irony, those that want me to lose myself and at times to shock me - but they all have to move me. And good art does though I know others may consider it to be crap - I consider some of what they revere as being the same load of crap - hence why there are so many different styles and ways and means of creating art as there are people and we shouldn't be corralled into lambasting or lauding work by the art world media - what is a critic but someone with a point of view, as we all have.The art establishment has a lot to answer for, deciding for the rest of us who is a good artist or not.
I don't really care who the artist is, how he lives or what he believes in just as I don't with authors - it's their work I am interested in. You sometimes find out that they were awful people, husbands, mothers, etc...but does that change the value of your reaction to their art - no, not really or you only have opinions founded on what should be correct, which is a pretty shallow reaction to ART.
...And the issue of Hockney putting down Hirst for using assistants is laughable - history shows that this has always been used as a means to an end. I actually think less of Hockney as a man for using this as an axe to grind.
Art, at times, is just an idea - just as great architects don't actually draw up the plans required to build a building much less actually get their hands dirty on the building site but does that make their concept any less outstanding - they know exactly how to get their idea out by using the best possible assistants.
