They buried David Hockney yesterday, with all the fanfare of a damp Yorkshire afternoon. No marching bands, no state procession. Just a few friends, a vicar who probably never held a brush, and the quiet shuffling of sensible shoes on wet gravel. The art world, that sprawling circus of decadence and self-congratulation, has lost its last great master of the visible. And we are left blinking into a future of empty conceptualism and curated banality.
Let us make no mistake: this was not a funeral for a man. This was the interment of an entire way of seeing. Hockney, that ornery genius of swimming pools and double portraits, was the final ember of a fire that began with the Renaissance. He believed, with all his cantankerous soul, that painting could still tell the truth about light, about flesh, about the sheer, stubborn joy of being alive. He painted Los Angeles with the love of a Turner painting Venice, and he painted his mother with the tenderness of a Rembrandt. In a world that has traded art for spectacle, he refused to stop looking.
And what do we have now? A generation of artists who think a banana taped to a wall is a statement on capitalism, or worse, who produce digital jellyfish for NFT auctions. Our galleries are filled with the detritus of theory; our critics speak of ‘problematising the gaze’ while failing to notice the exquisite sorrow in a Hockney chair. The intellectual decadence is complete. We have replaced craft with concept, beauty with identity, joy with grievance. Hockney was the last man standing against this tide, a grumpy Churchill of the paintbox, insisting that colour mattered more than commentary.
The low-key ceremony is itself a symbol. It says we are embarrassed by greatness now. We prefer our geniuses to be tortured melancholics, not cheerful obsessives who smoked like chimneys and painted poppies at 80. Hockney was too much life for our age of cancellation. He loved his own country badly enough to paint its drab fields and make them shimmer. He loved his own body enough to draw it with all its wrinkles and delight. This is the heresy of joy, and we cannot bear it.
So farewell, then, David Hockney. You were the last of your kind, a true artist in an age of charlatans. The funeral was quiet because the world has nothing loud left to say. Your swimming pools will outlast our Instagram feeds. Your portraits will shame our vacuous selfies. And your absence, that great white canvas of loss, will remain a reproach to every facile finger-painter who believes he is your equal. The art world has lost its eyes. And it is too busy weeping into its own navel to notice.