Hockney's war on the dreary

I've written about David Hockney's anti-nanny state activism for Spiked. I had always hoped to meet him (he attended a few FOREST parties), but sadly I never will. 

 

The contrast between the playfulness of Hockney’s bouts of libertarian activism and the po-faced outrage he received in response only served to underline his point. After Hockney sent the Guardian a piece of art criticising ‘anti-smoking fanatics’ in 2012, its readers responded by making drawings of their own – the artistic equivalent of bringing a knife to a gun fight – to whine about how ghastly smoking is. Unsurprisingly, they were the height of cringe.

After the Guardian ran a sycophantic interview with the Australian anti-smoking academic Simon Chapman, Hockney wrote a letter to the newspaper explaining why it would have been better off talking to him. Hockney listed all the things that he was and Chapman wasn’t, including being ‘a good and satisfied customer of the tobacco companies’, ‘not a professional agitator’ and ‘someone who prefers the centre of Bohemia to Australian suburbia’. As Chapman’s flaccid reply showed, it was the charge of not being Bohemian that stung him the most. It was hard to believe that a septuagenarian living in Bridlington was more edgy than a sociologist living in Melbourne, and yet we all knew it to be so.

The puritans and killjoys of ‘public health’ had no answer to him. He was a living legend and they weren’t. Spending all day painting and smoking is not everybody’s idea of a fulfilling life, but it sounded better than whatever Chris Whitty was doing. By shifting the debate from the risks of death to the joys of life, Hockney had taken them out of their comfort zone. All they could do was ignore him. It must have pained them to see him live too long for them to say, ‘I told you so’, but he was bound to die eventually. And now he has, and the world is a drearier place for it.

 

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