So the King has paid tribute to David Hockney. How very predictable. A monarch whose reign is little more than a sentimental pageant honouring a painter whose career was a long, sunny denial of the twentieth century. Hockney, we are told, was art’s great innovator. Innovator? He painted swimming pools. He painted California lawns. He gave us a world without shadows, without tragedy, without the gnawing anxiety that defines our age. That is not innovation. That is escapism dressed up in swimming trunks.
Compare him to the Victorians, who at least had the decency to confront death and empire. Hockney’s world is all bright colours and cheerful bathers, as if the fall of Rome had never happened. He is the court painter of a civilisation that refuses to grow up. His splash pools are the art equivalent of a theme park. You do not go to a Hockney exhibition to think. You go to wallow in a fantasy of eternal summer, to forget that the real world is burning.
And yet we canonise him. Why? Because he is safe. Because his paintings do not challenge the comfortable delusion that everything is fine. The King, poor man, must pretend to care. But let us be honest: Hockney’s legacy is not innovation. It is the last gasp of a culture that has given up on meaning. He is the final dandy, the last man to insist that art can be merely beautiful. For that, the establishment loves him. But historians will see him as a symptom of decline, not a cure.
