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A Return to
the
Hockney-Falco Thesis
by
Miles Mathis
a
Hockney masterpiece
Do you know
how a man makes his way in the world? Either by the splendor of
genius or the
adroitness of corruption. He must burst like a
cannonball into the ranks of his fellow men,
or he must glide
in among them like the pestilence.—Balzac
In 1999 David Hockney first
conceived the idea that the flowering of realistic painting, from
before the time of the Renaissance, was caused by the use of
lenses and other optical devices. The great leap from wooden
Medieval representation to Renaissance naturalism needed a cause,
and for Hockney this was it. Especially in studying artists like
Van Eyck and Holbein (and later Ingres), Hockney could not
believe that such heights of realism were attainable without
technological help. Hockney could not “eyeball” such precise
drawings himself, and if he could not do it, how could they?
Very soon Hockney had enlisted
Charles Falco, a condensed matter physicist from the University
of Arizona, as scientific ballast for his theory. He then
published a book in 2001, Secret Knowledge, which
explained this theory in greater detail, as well as illustrating
the theory with drawings and paintings Hockney had done with the
help of some of these optical devices.
Despite
the fact that a large part of the artistic community and the
scientific community found the thesis ludicrous and offensive, it
was almost immediately worked into the syllabi of art and art
history classes at all levels, including the undergraduate and
graduate levels at university. Students in many courses all over
the world are now taught this thesis as fact. This was achieved
mainly through Hockney’s stature and name recognition in the
avant garde. As Tom Wolfe pointed out many years ago, the inner
circles of art moderne are
quite small and clubby, cultish even. Facts have never been of
primary concern in this circle, and the coursework, like the
propaganda, can be tweaked to include almost anything, the more
absurd the better.
As for the public, they were, as
usual, in no position to judge. They are helpless before any PR
campaign, and the PR campaign of modernism has been one of the
most successful in history. As just one recent example, take the
2003 film Girl with a Pearl Earring. Most would say this
film promotes old-fashioned art, but much of it has the reverse
effect. After being hypnotized for a half hour by Scarlett
Johansson’s lips, the viewer is shown Colin Firth, as Vermeer,
using a camera obscura. Firth puts Johansson’s pretty head
under the coverlet, where she sees an image of the nearly
finished painting. She gasps and asks if the painting is really
in there. Firth laughs and tells her it is just an image. But we
have a rather large problem here. A camera obscura is not a
camera as we know it, so there can be no image when there is no
painting. In other words, the camera obscura would have to be
pointed at the painting for there to be an image of the painting.
No image could be stored! The invention of the proper plate and
emulsion and so on were still centuries in the future, so there
is no way there could have been any image in that box.
Beyond that, there is no
conceivable reason that Vermeer would have needed an image of his
unfinished painting in a box. The whole point of the camera
obscura, supposing Vermeer had one, was to transfer a
three-dimensional image—life!—to two dimensions, so that it
was easier to draw. But Vermeer’s painting was already in two
dimensions, so it would be pointless to aim the camera obscura at
it. That is quite literally taking a picture of a picture.
Neither the director nor the actors
nor the editors nor the writers nor the producers nor the
audience ever understood that. Here they were striking a very
public blow for the Hockney-Falco thesis and probably not even
realizing they were doing it. Now the worldwide public can say
they saw Vermeer using a camera obscura in that famous movie, so
it must be true. A popular belief is always more powerful than
any truth, despite what we are told.
That is all very bad, but it gets
worse. The nearly decade-old debate of the Hockney-Falco thesis
has been just as absurd as the thesis itself. The
counter-argument has been led by David Stork, a professor of
computer science at Stanford. Dr. Stork has given many lectures
and published many papers attacking the H-F thesis. He has done
some good work, and he happens to be correct, for the most part.
But the problem is that the question has never been decided by
the correct experts. The debate has been between fake artists,
physicists, and computer scientists. So we once again have a
tempest in the wrong teapot.
The first mistake in the scientific
response to Hockney is the assumption that Hockney’s thesis is
scientific. It isn’t. Hockney’s thesis isn’t even a thesis,
it is just very bald propaganda dressed up as a thesis. In
treating it as a scientific thesis, the academic community
confers upon Hockney’s idea a legitimacy it doesn’t merit.
You only seriously debate things that may or may not make sense,
but in this case there is no “may” involved. These scientists
and historians immediately began looking for evidence for and
against, but they forgot to ask if the question was mainly
evidentiary. They forgot to question why Hockney was proposing
the thesis: what the proposal might mean in the current milieu
and for the current art administration. They forgot to ask how
the proposal might act as a compensatory act for Hockney, as an
individual, and as misdirection for modernism. Because these
scientists and historians were not active players in the field of
art, they didn’t allow for the existence of all these
variables. Despite the ubiquity of Deconstruction, no one thought
to deconstruct Hockney’s intentions. What was needed was not a
cadre of physicists or historians or computer scientists; what
was needed was a team of psychologists.
 
this
is an Ingres painting
this is a Hockney painting
There is a
very simple reason this debate did not come up in the 19th
century, and it is because real artists were still in control of
art back then. In the 19th
century, artists debated topics that were important to them, and
since they didn’t debate this topic, we may assume it wasn’t
important. Why was it not important? It was not important for the
same reason that the production of milk is not debated by cows or
that the genesis of wood is not debated by trees. That is,
artists already knew the answer.
If you are an artist, you don’t need to ask how artists draw.
Artists draw with their hands, using their eyes, and that is all
there is to it. Yes, bad
artists may need to use cheating tricks, but there have always
been good artists, and the good artists did not have to ask
themselves how paintings got painted.
As simple proof of this, go to the
illustration from Hockney’s book (above), where he uses all
these cheating tools and still fails to draw well. This is
because Hockney is a bad artist. He can’t draw. So of course he
is going to wonder how it is done. Short people don’t really
understand how to slam dunk, and slow people don’t really
understand how to run fast, in the same way. But if they want a
lesson in how it is done, they go to tall and fast people to see
it done, directly. They don’t go to other short or slow people
with bigger mouths, or to physicists or computer scientists or
historians or critics.
In any other century this debate
would not have been possible. Only at the end of the 20th
century, when art had been nearly destroyed and the artist nearly
wiped out, could this question become a serious question. Art had
been taken over by the non-artist, and here he was, Hockney, the
rich and famous non-artist, asking publicly how art could be
done! He really couldn’t understand it. It had to be some kind
of trick, right? We have been taught that all art is some kind of
pose, so this old art must have been a different sort of pose, a
different sort of lie. The Getty Center taught us that talent
doesn’t exist, so it doesn’t, right? It is just smoke and
mirrors, like modernism, right?
This
was not done by
Hockney with a projector
To save us
from this idiocy, the media did not turn to real artists: nobody
knew what bomb shelter to look in. Everyone just supposed that
the real artist was extinct and that we were on our own with this
one. Bring in the computer scientist and let us run a few years
of tests: with enough computer models maybe we can tease out an
answer. And so we have seen high-profile symposia, well-attended
by the universities, where every technical point is argued ad
infinitum, from the quality of lenses,
the brightness of the light, shadow analysis, and so on.
In this way, the debate was, from
the beginning, misdirected into the wrong fields. The wrong
questions were asked, so even when they were answered correctly,
they did not lead to a resolution. Not only was the tempest in
the wrong teapot, it was in a misdefined teapot—a teapot that
could not whistle even when it was boiling.
For example, let us look at some of
Dr. Stork’s postulates. Just to be clear, I say “postulates”
on purpose. A postulate is an assumption you have before you
enter a debate. It is not one of the points you will debate: it
is one of the things that all sides agree upon. The ground rules,
if you like. He says, “Hockney’s claim is first and foremost
historical.” This is something that we may assume both the
physicist Falco and the computer scientist Stork agree upon.
But no, Hockney’s claim is first
and foremost artistic. It is a question of ability, not of
history. It concerns art history, yes, but it is an artistic
claim. As an artistic claim, it can be disproved with no
reference to history. Hockney’s claim is not just that artists
used optical devices, but that they used them because they
needed to. If they hadn’t used them, they wouldn’t have
been able to draw so well, and their paintings would have looked
like Medieval paintings, or Hockney’s paintings. That is not a
historical claim, that is an artistic claim, because it must mean
that living artists could not draw so well if they did not use
optical devices.
Because Hockney’s claim is not a
historical claim, it means that even if Hockney proves that
Vermeer or Ingres used optical devices, he would not have proved
his thesis. In that case, it could be argued against him that the
devices were used for the sake of convenience or speed, not need.
If it can be proved that artists can draw to any precision they
desire, then it does not matter what shortcuts artists in the
past may have used: Hockney is still wrong. If artists can draw
to any precision they desire, this must mean that the historical
advance in naturalism in the early Renaissance was not due to
optical devices, but was due to other causes.
Let us look at another postulate of
Dr. Stork:
A range of expertise is needed to
make and evaluate claims about Hockney's thesis. Someone without
firm educational foundation and professional experience in
several of these areas is likely to be unreliable.
Dr. Stork then gives us a list of
“scholars who have published in scholarly publications.” This
list is divided into “scientists/technologists, historians of
art or optics, and curators.” Notice anyone missing there? We
get a lot of emphasis on scholars and scholarship, don’t we?
You may ask yourself, are artists scholars? Could they be
considered scholars, under any contemporary scheme, without
getting a degree in art history? Could they get published in
“scholarly” journals of any type? Say that we brought one of
these artists that Hockney is talking about back from the dead:
actually transported him into the early 21st century.
Could he, based solely on his abilities and achievements, qualify
himself for publication or qualify himself as an expert? Would
Vermeer himself qualify as a scholar?
We also get this postulate:
The most important scientific
discipline required is computer vision, pattern recognition
and image analysis.
Interesting that the most important
requirement of Dr. Stork, the computer scientist, is that the
expert be a computer scientist. But really, do these postulates
contain any logic? Are scientists, historians and curators likely
to know the most about this topic? Let me put it another way, are
scientists, historians and curators the most likely to know the
most about basketball, or are the best basketball players the
most likely to know the most about basketball? Basketball players
do not have advanced degrees, a “range of professional
expertise”, nor have they published in peer-reviewed journals.
But if I have a question about basketball, give me Michael
Jordan. Specifically, if I have a question about what basketball
players can do, and if I see Michael Jordan do it, then I will
know that basketball players can do it. Michael will not have to
present to me a week-long symposium and a hatful of treatises. He
will do what he does, and say that is how it is done. If Hockney
still claims it cannot be done, we will know he is mad.
In closing this section, I want to
look at one final claim of Dr. Stork:
I've never said we've "disproved"
Hockney's theory—just cast great doubt upon his claims, surely
enough to refute his and Falco's claims they've "proven
artists as early as 1420 certainly did use optics—of this there
simply is no doubt."
Exactly my point here. Because Dr.
Stork treats Hockney’s claim as a historical one, he cannot
finally prove or disprove it. He can only show factual or logical
or historical inconsistencies in Hockney’s claim, and hope to
overwhelm the claim by a preponderance of evidence. But I can
disprove Hockney once and for all, since, as I show, his thesis
stands or falls on ability. He says something cannot be done, I
do it, and the argument is over. Not proof by a preponderance of
evidence, but proof by display. Proof by the existence of what is
claimed not to exist.
Why is this proof not accepted? It
is not accepted because there is no way to publish such a proof
in a scientific journal, an art journal, or a mainstream
publication. You will say it is quite easy to videotape a thing
and have it verified by an independent third party, but you are
missing my point. It is not a matter of videotaping the event. It
is a matter of getting published. Realist artists cannot get
published anywhere saying anything. I know this from experience.
They cannot get published in scientific journals because they are
not tenured scientists. They cannot get published in mainstream
journals because mainstream journals have prejudged all opinion
on art in favor of modernism and against realism. They cannot get
published in art journals because they are not famous modern
artists. You will say that if they are not famous, that may
reflect on their abilities. But that is to miss a central fact of
modern art: realists are not allowed to be famous. It is a
pre-established fact, a rule, set in stone before you even enter
the field. And who makes the rules? People like Hockney, people
who don’t want to be inconvenienced with talent or skill.
So you begin to see how it is. This
question can only be answered by real artists, but art moderne
disallowed real artists decades ago. Hockney is allowed to
propose asinine theories, since he is an insider; but, even
though his theory concerns the ability of artists who can draw
very well, no artists who can draw very well are allowed to give
testimony. And we find the same thing in science. Scientists do
not want expert testimony from artists, because if it is admitted
that artists are capable of giving expert testimony, scientists
are no longer needed to decide this question. For this reason,
everyone involved must be very careful to keep artists who can
draw out of the debate. Because once we get into the debate, it
is over very fast and everyone’s little agendas, whatever they
are, must immediately end. As you can see, several people have
built careers on this question. Hockney extended his faltering
career, and several scientists and historians and writers have
gotten their names into Wikipedia based on this alone.
Just to prove to you how
transparent this all is, I will relate to you an email exchange I
had with Dr. Stork. I wrote him after coming from his art site,
where he says these things I have quoted above. Nonetheless, I
offered him an alliance and pointed out to him a lot of
ammunition he was failing to use. But we soon got crossways. It
became very clear very fast that he considered himself the Pied
Piper, and I was just a rat or a child expected to follow
quietly. I finally told him I was going my own way, and would
publish my own thoughts on the matter. He replied, "Great.
Where do you think you'll publish? (Online won't make a dent, I'm
afraid.)" Here was the subtle turn of the blade, the hiss of
the snake. He might as well have said, "Poor boy, don't you
know that we have all publication roads blocked? If you want a
mention in this, you need to follow my lead and do what you're
told."
Well, I won't turn the reverse
knife so subtly. Dr. Stork, what you fail to understand is that,
as the real artist here, I cannot lose. I am the one that
produces the real art and the real writing. In two hundred years,
my paintings and my words will still be alive. They are alive
now, and they will live on. But you produce nothing. Your
computer models will be forgotten in ten years, and this whole
argument would dry up and blow away, except for my part in it.
From any distance, the only artistic content of this debate will
be this paper. So all your blocks will come to nothing. You can
only block me in the short term, but in the long term the Muses
will tend to my interests. If you knew anything about art and art
history, you would know this to be true.
This
was not done by
Hockney with a lead pipe, a blowtorch, and a box of tampons
But
to get back to Hockney. All these oily parties have managed to
spin this ultimately childish question—a question that should
have been decided with one wave of the hand—into almost a
decade of research and debate. If an artist like Rodin were still
around, he could have dismissed this question with one
authoritative shrug, a shrug which meant, “You foolish people
will never understand art, so quit trying. Just open your hearts
and your eyes, and let the sciomancer work his spell. Apply your
rulers and your computer models to electrons and let us be. No
amount of analysis will make art richer for you—just the
reverse. Could a computer model make sex sexier, or food taste
better? No. Just so, art. Some will say, if you want to know
about art, ask an artist. But I say, if you want to know about
art, look at a great painting or sculpture. That is all there is
to know.”
That no one finish this paper
thinking my main foe here is Dr. Stork, I will conclude by
thumping Hockney a few more times. What most people still have
not understood is that Hockney’s “thesis” was never a
thesis to start with. It was a faux-thesis, a small and pathetic
piece of agitprop posing as a genuine idea. And it became a
famous public idea because it was, at bottom, just more
propaganda for modernism and against realism. Hockney brought in
Dr. Falco to make his propaganda look scientific, but Hockney’s
opinion never had the slightest thing to do with condensed matter
physics, as I have shown.
The Hockney thesis did not just
happen to arrive in the year 2000. By the year 2000 we had
seen a decade-long rise of realism and a corresponding fall in
modernism. Even first-rank critics like Robert Hughes had begun
to attack modernism. Some of the old lies had lost their luster
with age: the horrible wrinkles began to show through the
make-up, and many began to lose their lust for the old whore.
What to do? Well, set the presses in motion again, of course.
Pump up the volume. If people weren’t buying the old lies
anymore, tell new lies at higher decibels. If the old whore was
past her prime, hire a new young whore and keep her in fresh
lipstick and clear heels. Anything to maintain the prices at
auction.
And so, concurrent with Hockney’s
book, we got articles
in Forbes
and the Wall
Street Journal and a thousand other
places telling us that modernism was still a great investment and
that realism was just a haunt of downmarket sluts. I
have written about these articles on this site. We
also got a billion dollar upgrade for the flagship of modernism
in the US: MOMA. We got a lot of noise and flutter meant to
convince us something was still happening, but nothing was really
happening except the beginning of a long and inexorable deflation
and decline. Yes, Duchamp’s slightly clever joke of 1917 was
being told again for the millionth time, by comedians who lacked
all sense of timing. Damien Hirst was still trying to find
something that hadn’t yet been put in a museum, so that he
could put it there and then be found clever. Ditto for Tracey
Emin and Rachel Whiteread and the Chapman brothers and a thousand
other fakes and phonies.
For Hockney this deflation was more
than a historical trend, it was a personal tragedy. He was
getting old and his fame was dissolving. If he had been Elizabeth
Taylor he would have come out with another perfume, but, being
Hockney, he couldn’t do that. No one wants to smell like a
modern artist. So Hockney did the next best thing: he wrote a
book. And he had a theory. As in the famous Monty Python sketch
with the theory of Anne Elk (Miss) on the brontosaurus, Hockney
had a theory, that he had, that was his and which belonged to
him, which was as follows and begins now: a theory that all
artists in history had the same ineptitude he has. The only
difference was, they had discovered tricks he hadn’t yet
mastered. Yes, they had machines.
Just savor that for a moment before
we move on. Artists from 500 years ago were better than us due
to machines. I could chew on that all day.
To spell it out, we have much
better machines now, so shouldn't we be able to draw much better
than the Old Masters? Hockney doesn't need to use camera obscuras
or camera lucidas. Someone should tell him that we now have
actual cameras, with storable images, and high quality projectors
of all kinds. If he wants to cheat, he can cheat with all the
fruits of modern technology. Why doesn't he talk about or use
this technology in Secret Knowledge? Because he had
already been using it for decades, and even with it he couldn't
draw for sour apples. But he couldn't put that fact out in the
open, since it would undercut his "thesis" in a second.
This
was not done by
Hockney with a crowbar, a stack of paper plates, and a set of #30
ball bearings
It's not just Hockney
who can't ride any technology, old or new, to better or equal the
Old Masters. No one living can do what they did, either freehand
or with rooms of technology. Logically, this must mean that their
achievements were not based on technology. Their achievements
were based on a number of things that almost no one in this
debate ever mentions: social factors, beginning with education
and encouragement, but also including a market for good work, the
availability of cheap models, the availability of cheap
assistants, the availability of affordable studios with high
ceilings and the necessary square footage, the availability of
good equipment and materials, and the time needed to use all
these things. Concerning this last item, contemporary realists
who want to make a living must work with galleries, and galleries
want a large number of small paintings, delivered quickly. In the
contemporary world, time has speeded up greatly. Only a hundred
years ago, Sargent could get 85 sittings with a portrait client.
These days, you can't get 85 sittings with your own wife, or with
yourself. Try to imagine how much model time someone like Rubens
or Lebrun or David burned for just one of their large paintings.
I don't make enough money in a year to pay the models it would
take for one of
those paintings, paid by the hour. These are the things that make
a difference, not cameras or lenses or calipers.
This theory was so infantile in so
many ways it will be impossible for future historians to believe
it ever made the papers, but Hockney happened to be a member of a
sect that thrived on infantilism. Modernism had been accepting
artwork based on a purposely upside-down set of criteria for a
full century. It wanted and demanded non-artistic art, so that it
could deconstruct the entire category. Modernists have been
stating this in clear declarative sentences at least since the
time of Futurism, around 1909. Clement Greenberg gave us the most
influential codification of these criteria in the 1940’s. So
why should anyone in the universities or journals or institutions
of modernism balk at accepting historical theories that were just
as absurd as the art and the political justifications for the
art? No, the correct modern thing to do is accept them because
they are absurd, because they are infantile, because they are
lacking all sense. Those who incorporated the Hockney-Falco
thesis into the universities never asked for proof of the thesis
or the least evidence for it. They have never followed these
debates because they don’t care if the thesis is true. They
only care that the thesis is useful to their careers.
Like Anne Elk's theory of the
brontosaurus (small on one end, large in the middle, and small
again on the other end) Hockney’s theory is so devoid of
rational content that it is little more than a pasting together
of holes. But let us—just so the future may continue to
laugh—look for a moment at another of the larger of these
holes. We now have a decade of commentary on the theory, but no
one has yet commented on the irony of a modern artist proposing
that Medieval artists painted the way they did because they
couldn’t do any better. Doubtless, future historians will, in
the same way, judge cubism. They will not realize that cubism was
a choice of Picasso. They will think that Picasso caught a
bug sometime around 1905, destroying his ability to focus his
eyes and move his limbs.
You see, Hockney’s thesis is just
as ridiculous. Hockney knows that modernism was a choice.
He knows that 20th century artists quit drawing well
on purpose, for political and theoretical reasons. But he cannot
apply the same logic to Medieval artists. It never occurs to him
that Medieval icons look like they do because the artists (and
the church) wanted them to look that way. He cannot ask
himself the obvious artistic question, because he cannot think
like an artist. The obvious question is this: would a Medieval
icon be more powerful—as a religious icon—if it were
painted realistically? Of course not. Medieval icons don’t look
like photographs because the Medieval artists didn’t want them
to look like photographs. Reality didn’t have the requisite
mystery for the desired effect, so it wasn’t attempted.
An analogous question is this:
would Picasso’s Blue Period paintings have the same effect if
they were painted in correct colors, with correct lines, in a
naturalistic manner? Again, No. Picasso didn’t paint his
Harlequins that way by accident, or because he couldn’t achieve
a Bouguereau-type realism. He painted them that way with full
artistic intent.
Just so, the Medieval painters.
Medieval painters weren’t influenced by technological
considerations, like the availability of lenses and so on. They
were influenced by creative considerations. They were
influenced by church and social doctrine, which naturally
impelled them into certain styles.
Remember that the basic question
Hockney is trying to answer is "why would the Medieval
painters paint that way?" If a lot of people hadn't asked
themselves that question, Hockney's thesis would never have
gained a foothold. "If human talent is a constant, why would
the Medieval painters have chosen to paint that way? Why would
anyone who could paint like Raphael choose to paint wooden icons
instead?" That is the question that most people cannot
answer, and Hockney seems to answer it. The Medieval painters
hadn't discovered the proper tools for looking at the world.
Their hands and brains were limited by their lack of technology.
That is his answer. But the towering irony is that Hockney will
not ask the same question of the 20th century. Why would a
culture that could produce Leonardo and Michelangelo decide to
start exhibiting slashed canvases and ballpens and lotto tickets
as art? Because, for some reason, they preferred it, just as
Medieval society preferred wooden icons. You have to remember
that people are crazy, and entire cultures can go crazy for
decades or centuries. We are living through one such time: why
should it be hard for us, as a deranged culture, to understand
the derangement of the Middle Ages? The answer: deranged people
are even less empathetic than normal people. There is no
brotherhood of derangement, only a psychotic isolation. This is
what I meant by my claim above that what we need here is not a
debate of physical evidence, but a thorough psychological
analysis. We do not need a shadow analysis of the Old Master
paintings, we need a shadow analysis of Hockney's brain,
literally.
You would think this would be
obvious to anyone who did any amount of freethinking about these
matters, but I have met almost no one who has. Just as the
Medieval artists were compelled by the church, modern people feel
compelled by society to take one of the two given sides in any
argument or debate. They cannot strike out on their own and take
a third side, even when the third side is clearly better, since
they wouldn’t have as many friends sitting with them there.
If you take Hockney’s side you
have all of modernism sitting with you. All the universities will
be your friend and all the other institutions, too. If you take
Dr. Stork’s side you will have a goodly portion of academia on
your side and sizable portion of the public. If you take a third
side you are on your own. You may have the satisfaction of being
correct, the satisfaction of not looking like a complete fool to
future artists and other sensible people, but what good will that
do you now?—now, when sensible people are outnumbered by
whooping cranes.
What both sides of this debate are
constitutionally unable to do is to look at the question from any
elevation or distance. Both are caught up in banal, quotidian,
careerist currents, narrowly defined by their own inabilities and
misunderstandings. This is not surprising, since we are all
limited by our own abilities and understandings. How could it be
otherwise? The difference is, because we are in the arena of art
with this "thesis", everyone has lost every last
vestige of self-control. Physicists and computer scientists could
not unilaterally appoint themselves authorities in basketball—to
return to my earlier analogy—because they would immediately be
laughed off the court. But unlike sport, art is a field that has
been razed. It has been cut down to bare ground: it is a desert.
It has been forcibly depopulated. The natural inhabitants of this
ecosystem have been wiped out by decades of genocidal policy, and
the only critters still around are the subterranean vermin,
scurrying through dirty burrows and pits—the fake artists and
fake critics and other fake beings of this cratered ghostland.
Because this desert appears to be
empty of sentient life, it allows for its temporary resettlement
by any passing party, be they a party of physicists or computer
scientists or journalists or social workers or critics or
historians or theorists of any kind. Anyone with any new religion
can set up an outpost here and begin passing out fliers, with no
threat of contradiction. Everyone who claims to be an expert is
an expert, since no one is at hand to say otherwise.
So I can understand that it is a
shock to all concerned when I poke my head from the dust and
dregs, fully armored and in a blaze of health, and begin lopping
off people’s arms and legs. They can only find it a bit unfair.
They had been told this ground was deedless and ownerless. They
did not expect to see so much as a skeleton, much less a fiery
sword. They had thought the ancient castle undefended; the gold
free to the passing crows and vultures.
Let this writing stand as a
signpost then. I am here. The sword of Cellini is not lost. The
dagger of Caravaggio is still sharp. Trespass at your peril. This
land was bequeathed to me in a long line, in clearest deed and
name, and I will not suffer it to be defiled any further. Keep
your effluxes and effluents on your own lawn: my desert will be
swept clean by the winds, blown by the unsoiled Muses and by the
gusts of my ventricose pen. I will nightly drive the maze of
tunnels, and when I come upon the creatures crawling there in
their own muck and ooze, I will slay them—slay them with as
little guilt as St. Michael, slaying the ancient sinners.
For
more against Hockney, you may go here.
Click
here to see my first letter to the editors on this subject,
from 2000, also published at ARC in 2004.
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