Cutting-Edge Art or Lazy Git?

Pre-digital camera, we all used to make panoramic shots by taking several photos and joining them up. When David Hockney started doing it, apparently he was a fucking genius, even though his Polaroid collages took no more than 5 hours to complete. Now, the New York Review of Books reports, he's making art using the Brushes app on his iPhone.

Over the past six months, Hockney has fashioned literally hundreds, probably over a thousand, such images, often sending out four or five a day to a group of about a dozen friends, and not really caring what happens to them after that. (He assumes the friends pass them along through the digital ether.) These are, mind you, not second-generation digital copies of images that exist in some other medium: their digital expression constitutes the sole (albeit multiple) original of the image.

Here's one:



Good, isn't it? And time-saving, too.

In a Guardian interview, Hockney explains,

There are advantages and disadvantages to anything new in mediums for artists, but the speed allowed here with colour is something new. Swapping brushes in the hand with oil or watercolour takes time.

Here's another couple:

It's probably a good job he hasn't tried any of the many other available iPhone apps out there.