Myeah… or perhaps I should say M’naah?
Pretty underwhelmed and disappointed with the Hockney thing at the Fitz. If the beautiful sunny day hadn’t put me in such a good mood I’d ordinarily have been pretty miffed at the £10 we splashed on parking in town.
We were a bit nonplussed some years back at a Fitz offering called Vermeer’s Women (or something similar), which, I/we felt, rather disingenuously, used the pull of Vermeer’s name to lure you into a show with only one or two paintings actually by the titular artist.
Likewise, the amount of Hockney we saw today would’ve only filled one of the normal temporary display areas visiting shows usually use. Rather notably one of these rooms was completely closed, whilst the other was mostly blocked off, the small open portion being bulked out with modern screen-media stuff.
I’ve now had it pretty thoroughly confirmed that I’m not a fan of Hockney’s forays into iPad land. It was notable how the largest crowds of spectators in the show were to be found worshipping at the several screens. Guess I must be some kind of artsy fuddy-duddy? Such stuff is of literally zero interest to me.
Strangely, for a somewhat maverick magpie type artist, it’s his most trad stuff, at least on this occasion, I get most from. Whether that’s his portraits – and I preferred some of the lower profile subjects to the more typical ‘great and good’ (or is that just celebs, in our era?) – or his landscapes (whether peopled or semi-abstract).
But little or rather none of this stuff, er, sorry… art, is really very remarkable. The juxtapositions with the permanent collection items seemed both a bit lazy and often quite tenuous or slapdash. All told, a rather paltry effort. The only thing this was big on, for me, was disappointment.
The show was called Hockney’s Eye. And I suppose there was some kind of theme in there somewhere. But, just as I wasn’t remotely tempted to shell out the £39 for the accompanying book, nor was my interest piqued by the ideas the exhibition may or may not have been presenting.
I recently said somewhere else here on ye blogge that Hockney might be the closest contemporary British art comes to having a Vesuvian talent like Picasso. But on the evidence of this showing this is a volcano long since gone dormant.
In one word, disappointing.