David Hockney's Garbage

I hate David Hockney’s iPad “paintings” that are being shown in Paris now. The reason you keep hearing about Hockney and his iPad drawings is that it is really remarkable that a painter who recently had an auction result of $7.9 million (for, to be fair, a really good painting) starts making things that have no or little value, it does screw mightily with the natural expected order of things! This is the equivalent of Justin Timberlake walking around Williamsburg handing out hand-burned flash drives basically. (Which would also be cool.) So that’s all marvelous and awesome and unexpected and confusing. But it doesn’t change the fact that these drawings are mostly crap. Though not always! His recent New Yorker cover was good! So maybe there’s some hope in all this mind-bending anarchy that something unexpectedly valueless can also be, like, good.