In contrast to the postmodernist visual artist that showed up in New York and Europe in the eighties, Hockney is not someone who felt that art innovation or movement toward a future had exhausted itself. In fact Hockney following his interest in Picasso continued to explore something like Picasso's motives in cubism to explore realism that incorporated time into painting. This direction is counter posed to the main thrust of visual postmodernism which has basically focused upon pastiche and a loss of the sense that differences between schools of thought meant anything. The lack of chirascuro concerns in Hockney, and the lack of drama in his work by comparison to Caravaggio is certainly a weakness of comparison to Caravaggio, but both men have been heavily associated with an attempt to express elements of sexual otherness, i.e. gayness that has been subversive in their modest ways.
In addition Hockney is very original thinker concerning photography. There is no one like Hockney who has ever worked in photography. I am talking about the composite work that Hockney has done over his lifetime. This sort of work is a real attempt by Hockney to push the boundaries of expression, and is not suitable for reproduction in photograph in magazines or books where most photographic work is encountered by the public. In that sense that the tools Hockney uses are modest, the kind of work that Hockney does is accessible as a like act of creation to anyone who has a polaroid camera, and not patrician like the photography of Ansel Adams that Hockney continues to live up to a desire to take seriously popular culture that motivated the sixties movement called Pop art. I suppose that could be called kitsch, and postmodern, but it really lacks the sense of exhaustion and decay of sensibilty that properly accompanies postmodern work. The art market doesn't support expansion of the sort of photographic work that I admire in Hockney because it can't be reproduced in book form with the intent that goes with multiple composition. Hockney is not the best example of the bankruptcy of painting culture by any means. If that is what Chuck meant. But Hockney would not be someone who spent much of his life trying to advance the broad interests of working class people visually. In that sense he is weak and pallid as a source of inspiration for the understanding that Marxist would have toward the working class which I think is important. But so is most of the history of western visual art. Not so much so of the movies and television, but that is another story isn't it? regards, Doyle