Hockney has more than just a dog in that fight. He is not an objective clear sighted observer. You need to start with that understanding.
Then consider that he is not a scientist but has yet claimed to use scientific methods, but then doesn’t take into account the preponderance of evidence nearly all of which more than tends to disprove his position.
A real scientist identifies all of the facts, and then tries to find a theory which incorporates the entire field of data in a reliable, predictable, and duplicatable way.
Hockney looks through hundreds of years of art history and picks out the rare bit or piece of data that might be used to support a theory which he came up with before viewing the data objectively.
He then ignores the entire history of hundreds of years of information, reports from witnesses and journals of artists, inventories from the estates of artists, and endless anecdotal information from thousands of artists, students, historians, collectors, conservators, scholars, practicing artists, clerics, even records of art dealers and municipal governments over the centuries, and then instead, uses his few bits and pieces of data to prop up his wild theory.
Were it not for an enormous modernist establishment out to help him denigrate realistic methods and techniques in order to justify the billions invested in their ….. ”products” …. nobody would have given this wacky theory the time of day. Under the blazing lights of true scientific scrutiny, his “secret knowledge” amounts to no more then a self-serving flight of fancy, devoid of reason, logic, evidence or common sense.
Whatever his motives, Piet, his ideas are just so much trash not worthy of one scintilla of credibility.
Now might I ask just what are your motives for bringing into question the motives and “truthfulness” of the majority of goodart people that you know to be composed of so many professional and highly experienced people, many of whom are clearly experts in their fields?
Fred
