David Hockney, everyone’s favorite cigarette enthusiast, will see his 1963 painting, Great Pyramid at Giza with Broken Head from Thebes, appear at auction for the first time ever at the postwar and contemporary sale this February at Christie’s London. Read More
Tate’s director, Nicholas Serota, is having a great day, announcing that his museum has accepted a gift of nine prime postwar works, including pieces by the recently deceased Lucian Freud and David Hockney, from London collectors and philanthropists Mercedes and Ian Stoutzker. The BBC has the story. Read More
Ian Jack wonders if it is a problem that David Hockney’s blossoms look like “evil yellow slugs.” [Guardian UK]
Georgina Adam on the ongoing controversy involving a Rauschenberg, a stuffed eagle and the IRS. [Financial Times]
David Shrigley has a new billboard coming to the High Line, at 10th Avenue and 18th Street, April 5—his deadpan brand of twee existential insecurity writ large, super large. [Paper Magazine] Read More
Dear David Hockney,
Your two letters to The Guardian, “The trouble with tobacco haters” and “The pleasures of tobacco,” and pretty much everything you say therein, has me convinced that you are kind of the coolest. You are, indeed, someone who is immune to the manipulations of advertising. You are looking out for number one, and you don’t care who knows it. Your acute awareness that “we have to die” someday makes me want to live for today, to hell with caution! (Ah, if only cigarettes didn’t cost $14 in Manhattan!) Read More
The posters for David Hockney’s upcoming show at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, “A Bigger Picture,” feature a line of copy that boasts “All the works here were made by the artist himself, personally,” a swipe directed at Damien Hirst ahead of that artist’s 11-gallery spot painting show at Gagosian. Read More
