INTERVIEW BY DAVID SHEFF
THE ROLLING STONE INTERVIEW | December 13-27, 1990

DAVID SHEFF: Your paintings now sell for literally millions of dollars. How has that affected you?
DAVID HOCKNEY: I’ve always had sufficient money to do what I wanted to do, even when I didn’t have much. Once you’ve got enough to do what you want to do, you’re very rich and you realize that. If you’re painting away, which is what you want to do, what on earth would you want a lot of money for?

SHEFF: How did it feel when A Grand Procession of Dignitaries went for $2 million?
HOCKNEY: It made me stop painting for a few years. I was very troubled by it. Someone must be very, very rich to buy paintings of mine. But if an artist can’t really sell his work anymore to, say, professional people around his age, you wonder what they’re being done for, or for whom. But with faxes or Xeroxes or laser prints, you can do anything you want. You can give them away, you can send them to Brazil or to Moscow, anywhere where there is a telephone, fax machine and a bit of paper.

SHEFF: Are you still taking lots of photographs?
HOCKNEY: I’ve lost interest in photography. I believe that the photograph is on its way to losing its veracity.

SHEFF: How so?
HOCKNEY: For 150 years the photograph has had a special position amongst pictures. You believed that at one point in time and space, something similar to what was in the photograph had been in front of a camera. Drawing and painting did not have that veracity. We don’t necessarily believe photographs anymore. They can be used in manipulative ways – such as when Stalin took Trotsky out of a photograph to imply that he wasn’t at Lenin’s side when the revolution was happening. With computer technology, it will happen easier and more and more.

SHEFF: With what effect?
HOCKNEY: Now we see photography with a cynical eye. There will be less and less believe in photos or television-news footage, because we know it cold well be altered. Soon there will be nothing more objective about a photograph than a painting. Nothing will be sacred. In the final scene of Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart walks off with Claude Rains. But a computer can now scan the whole movie and reconstruct it, so that you would have Bogart get on the plane.

SHEFF: Wouldn’t you oppose that?
HOCKNEY: It’s like the people who say we should not colorize old movies. They say it is taking a work of art and ruining it. That’s a lot of poppycock. Those are not the arguments of artists, but the arguments of conservators. Artists have always taken other works of art and done things with them. It’s like complaining that Duchamp put a mustache on the Mona Lisa.

SHEFF: Why? [on longest to maintain a relationship]
HOCKNEY: First of all, because I’m an artist. Artists are not great people to live with. They tend to put their work first. Beyond that, a straight person starts a family. It’s different if you are gay. You don’t quite know how to organize your life.

SHEFF: Do you consider any of your art political?
HOCKNEY: First of all, what is political art? Painting is not just about content. To make an art that’s really going to do something, then a painting has to be reproducible, because it has to be seen. If it’s only seen by a few people, it’s not a very good form of propaganda. And a lot of what’s passed off as a political art frankly doesn’t even work as art. Still, I do feel I’m giving a message in my art: You shouldn’t expect life to be great, but there are joys in it, sometimes very small and very close to you. That’s a political message.

SHEFF: How important is art in society?
HOCKNEY: We need art. There’s no society that never had it. Most of it might be pretty low, most of it might be pretty bad, but we need it. High art and low art is a critic’s concept, not artists’ concepts. Artists know that there is no real division between high art and low art. We need Johann Strauss, and we need Beethoven. Strauss might be about the forth of life, but the froth is there.

SHEFF: Is your work closer to Strauss or Beethoven?
HOCKNEY: That’s not my job to answer. In some book, some critic said, “in the Thirties, if a movie critic had said Laurel and Hardy were great artists, most of the critics would have thought they were being facetious.” I think that’s unbelievably arrogant. In the Thirties millions of people did think they were great artists. Millions of people flocked to the movies and responded to them. Now we know they’re lasting, which means they touch the universal much better than we thought.

SHEFF: But popular appeal can’t be the arbiter: Millions of people love Rambo.
HOCKNEY: Well, part of it is how long it lasts. Masses of art are made and immediately disappear. The Rambo films came, and an awful lot of people saw them, but how many people in the future will see them? If a few generations think the art is good, they’re probably right.

SHEFF: How would you respond to the critic who said you’re the most important artist of the last half century?
HOCKNEY: I would simply laugh at that.

SHEFF: Do your paintings reflect your life?
HOCKNEY: My life is, I admit, a lot sadder than what my paintings might suggest. I can’t see the sadness lifting, actually.

SHEFF: Sadness because of what?
HOCKNEY: Friends dying. Of AIDS. When you have a lot of friends, your contemporaries, that die at relatively young ages, it’s highly unusual. At first you think, “This is odd; he was younger than me.” But when it gets to be about eighteen people, it is not simply odd. These are people whom I expected to grow old with.

SHEFF: Why doesn’t that sadness filter into your paintings?
HOCKNEY: I don’t see the world that way. In spite of it all, I do also see the world as beautiful. If we don’t I think we’re doomed.