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Author Topic: iHockney- Artist David Hockney and his iPhone (and the death of printing?)  (Read 7072 times)

teddillard

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I'm gonna toss this grenade out here...  I saw a story in Vanity Fair about David Hockney "painting" with his iPhone, and saw it here as well:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/oct/22/david-hockneys-iphone-passion/  This is actually much more in-depth than the VF story.

The thing that got me thinking was not actually that he made these little paintings with the iPhone and the Brushes app, but that he's displayed them on phones in the shows he's had.  He distributes them electronically, creating literally a flood of these paintings.  But no prints.

Now here's the next part of my thinking.  I have a teenager.  He's grown up around photography...  always had cameras, but has no interest whatsoever in printing or prints.  Clearly, his generation lives by what they see on the screen.  Add to that the Hockney story, and keep in mind - we've been having a discussion over here about the history of inkjet printing, and Hockney was one of the very first to get digital prints into any collection, back in the early days, and also one of the first to have the same done with IRIS prints.  He's clearly always been at the forefront of fine art and very involved in digital art...

Sooo....  

Do you think we're seeing the demise of the print?  Are you printing less?  Am I overreacting or losing my mind?  Are these too many connections of unrelated things??  Is this my thinking just because I'm printing fine art right now?  ::)
« Last Edit: February 10, 2011, 03:22:42 pm by teddillard »
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Ted Dillard

Sven W

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Re: iHockney- Artist David Hockney and his iPhone (and the death of printing?)
« Reply #1 on: February 10, 2011, 03:32:17 pm »

My four kids grow up with the Net, sms, chats, Facebook, Playstations, digi-cameras, cellphones, et al.
But they love to have prints on their walls ;D
And books, sculptures, paintings, drawings, handicraft, and.....

/Sven
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Stockholm, Sweden

teddillard

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Re: iHockney- Artist David Hockney and his iPhone (and the death of printing?)
« Reply #2 on: February 10, 2011, 03:37:16 pm »

Just read a little more carefully- here's a comment Hockney made:
“Though it is worth noting,” he adds, lighting one of his perennial cigarettes, “that the images always look better on the screen than on the page. After all, this is a medium of pure light, not ink or pigment, if anything more akin to a stained glass window than an illustration on paper.”
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Ted Dillard

Les Sparks

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Re: iHockney- Artist David Hockney and his iPhone (and the death of printing?)
« Reply #3 on: February 10, 2011, 04:00:54 pm »

If you want to be sure that the print (photo or painting) is around for more than a few  years, it has to be printed  So I print the images that are important --my daughter's wedding, some of the photos  with my kids in them when we're on vacation, special places we've been, etc.  I find that I'm  printing more, not less.
Other things I post on my website, other websites, or give out on CDs or DVDs.
I sure that the prints will be viewable 20 or 50 years from now. Some of the other stuff may be viewable (websites go down, for example) but I suspect that most of it won't be.  I'm sure all of us (at least those involved in digital things for more than a few years) have documents stored on zip disks, floppy disks, and other media that we can no longer view.
 
So at least for me, anything that is really important gets printed. Same holds for documents (letters, tax  records, or whatever), if you want to be sure  it's viewable in the future, you need to print it.
Les
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MHMG

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Re: iHockney- Artist David Hockney and his iPhone (and the death of printing?)
« Reply #4 on: February 10, 2011, 04:36:21 pm »

Yes, printing is indeed optional these days. Whereas up until the late 1990s, the only logical and easy way to share an image was to make a print (even early email recipients couldn't always deal with a digital photo), today the easy way is to upload an image to your Facebook wall, etc. for friends and family to see at their leisure.

All that said, I can't sign a flat panel display and give it as a gift!  I think my prints will be more rare and more interesting (even if not of any financial value) to the next generation and to generations thereafter. My children have already told me so.

cheers,

Mark
http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com
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Sven Bernert

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Re: iHockney- Artist David Hockney and his iPhone (and the death of printing?)
« Reply #5 on: February 10, 2011, 06:41:08 pm »

Interesting article and topic. Just imagine his iphone hanging on the wall displaying his paintings.  :o  ;)

Here is my take on the subject: yes, for all the small photo album size paper "prints" (10x15 cm or so) printing gets more and more replaced by electronic viewing devices. Which is great since we are all producing a lot more images these days. I'm traveling a lot and love having my family and other personal pictures with me all the time (phone).

Visual communication via images in general has become a bigger part of our lives during the last couple of years. I'm an engineer by trade and currently quite heavily involved in airframe fatigue testing. I cant even remember what we did in the pre-digital compact camera age. I have colleagues taking pictures of drawings from their computer screens with their iphones and then using their phones to check the airframe structure against the drawing by using the zoom function of their phones. No more printing involved at all.


But no electronic device will replace a fine art print hanging in A2 size or bigger at the wall of my living room or the large glossy prints hanging in our clients businesses helping them to sell their products to their clients. At least not today.

Tomorrow (or in a not so distant future) advanced display technology will replace todays paper prints and we will discover “that the images always look better on the screen than on the page. After all, this is a medium of pure light, not ink or pigment, if anything more akin to a stained glass window than an illustration on paper.”

From todays POV this might be hard to believe. But remember what they said in the early 2000s about how much longer film will stay as a recording medium for our images. Just little 10 years later the majority of labs have died.

To get an idea about future display technology watch this You Tube video

My 2 cents, YMMV.

Sven
« Last Edit: February 10, 2011, 06:43:14 pm by Sven Bernert »
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jwwbrennan

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Re: iHockney- Artist David Hockney and his iPhone (and the death of printing?)
« Reply #6 on: February 10, 2011, 06:57:19 pm »

People are still painting and chipping away at stone. Things don't really go away, they just become more exclusive.
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Jim Brennan

teddillard

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Re: iHockney- Artist David Hockney and his iPhone (and the death of printing?)
« Reply #7 on: February 10, 2011, 07:01:42 pm »

Very true, and my favorite quote from the story:
"It’s all part of the urge toward figuration. You look out at the world and you’re called to make gestures in response. And that’s a primordial calling: goes all the way back to the cave painters. May even have preceded language. People are always asking me about my ancestors, and I say, Well there must have been a cave painter back there somewhere. Him scratching away on his cave wall, me dragging my thumb over this iPhone’s screen. All part of the same passion."

It always feels like that to me, making and hanging art.  Scratching on the wall of my cave...   ;D
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Ted Dillard

tom b

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Re: iHockney- Artist David Hockney and his iPhone (and the death of printing?)
« Reply #8 on: February 10, 2011, 07:38:54 pm »

I hope that Hockney gives up painting soon. The National Gallery of Australia bought his painting A Bigger Grand Canyon for Au$4.6 million and what a garish piece of art it is. The director who purchased the painting has left the gallery and the artwork is now hidden behind a stairway.

You can see the image here:

http://www.friendsofart.net/en/art/david-hockney/a-bigger-grand-canyon

The Art Gallery of NSW purchased A closer winter tunnel for Au$ 3.6 million dollars and it is another ugly painting. You can see it here:

http://www.artknowledgenews.com/David_Hockney_Landscape.html

Hockney is playing around with digital art but when you can get millions of dollars for big, ugly paintings everyone knows what he will be doing.

Cheers



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Tom Brown

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Re: iHockney- Artist David Hockney and his iPhone (and the death of printing?)
« Reply #9 on: February 11, 2011, 12:24:27 am »

His iphone "paintings" are almost as good as the ones my 5 & 7 year old kids do!
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Ernst Dinkla

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Re: iHockney- Artist David Hockney and his iPhone (and the death of printing?)
« Reply #10 on: February 11, 2011, 03:11:11 am »

Yes, printing is indeed optional these days. Whereas up until the late 1990s, the only logical and easy way to share an image was to make a print (even early email recipients couldn't always deal with a digital photo), today the easy way is to upload an image to your Facebook wall, etc. for friends and family to see at their leisure.

All that said, I can't sign a flat panel display and give it as a gift!  I think my prints will be more rare and more interesting (even if not of any financial value) to the next generation and to generations thereafter. My children have already told me so.

cheers,

Mark
http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com

Some years back it was estimated that 80% of pictures made were not printed. That percentage must have grown. The number of pictures made must have grown considerably too, it wouldn't surprise me if it was more than a 1000%. So who knows we still may have enough to print.

On selling virtual art, Ger van Elk did this some years back:
http://www.rabokunstcollectie.nl/content/kunstenaars/1920_1950/ger_van_elk/kunstwerken.jsp
He is probably one of the best selling Dutch artists, internationally as well. He wasn't the first and only one to sell LCD + harddisc art.

On iPhone art and picture quality:
http://www.graphicbrain.com/studies-by-vigc/mypantone-on-iphone/
Colorsync on the Macs may not be what it once was but is still better than color control on the iPhone.

There are new screen display technologies like Liquavista's electrowetting (reflective CMYK possible at video rate .. and more) that have a low demand on energy, thin panels, large screens possible. Solid state memory + low energy ARM  CPU's and there is another threat to inkjet prints on the wall.


met vriendelijke groeten, Ernst Dinkla

Dinkla Gallery Canvas Wrap Actions for Photoshop
http://www.pigment-print.com/dinklacanvaswraps/index.html
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Anthony.Ralph

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Re: iHockney- Artist David Hockney and his iPhone (and the death of printing?)
« Reply #11 on: February 11, 2011, 05:11:37 am »

I hope that Hockney gives up painting soon. The National Gallery of Australia bought his painting A Bigger Grand Canyon for Au$4.6 million and what a garish piece of art it is. The director who purchased the painting has left the gallery and the artwork is now hidden behind a stairway.

You can see the image here:

http://www.friendsofart.net/en/art/david-hockney/a-bigger-grand-canyon

The Art Gallery of NSW purchased A closer winter tunnel for Au$ 3.6 million dollars and it is another ugly painting. You can see it here:

http://www.artknowledgenews.com/David_Hockney_Landscape.html

Hockney is playing around with digital art but when you can get millions of dollars for big, ugly paintings everyone knows what he will be doing.

Cheers


David Hockney has always experimented with different media; the Polaroid montages and the Quantel Paintbox are two examples. I suppose the latter would be be an earlier experiment in " playing around with digital art"? I will admit to being biased as I have found David Hockney's work invariably interesting and his exploration of new media refreshing and indeed inspirational.

As to the two pictures you mention; I suppose it is a case of "beauty being in the eye of the beholder" as I find the Yorkshire pictures he produced an entirely evocative depiction having a rugged beauty quite in keeping with the terrain. Although I have visited the Grand Canyon only once, his painting does, for me, capture something significant about it.

Each to their own I suppose...

Anthony.

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fetish

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Re: iHockney- Artist David Hockney and his iPhone (and the death of printing?)
« Reply #12 on: February 11, 2011, 05:13:32 am »

Acutally, with inkjet-printable OLED arrays around the corner, i think we'll have transparency prints with their own lightsource printed into the substrate in the near future.
All the goodness of transmitted light and the tangible-ness of prints.
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feppe

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Re: iHockney- Artist David Hockney and his iPhone (and the death of printing?)
« Reply #13 on: February 11, 2011, 03:52:39 pm »

Paper prints will be (more of a) niche product in the near future. We'll have paper-thin wall-sized color e-paper or something similar, and eventually wallpaper - hell, we'll have disposable milk cartons showing video advertisements for cereals in a few years. I'm taking bets.

Slobodan Blagojevic

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Re: iHockney- Artist David Hockney and his iPhone (and the death of printing?)
« Reply #14 on: February 11, 2011, 04:26:32 pm »

His iphone "paintings" are almost as good as the ones my 5 & 7 year old kids do!

Then it really must hurt that you can not sell them for millions of dollars too ;)

deanwork

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Re: iHockney- Artist David Hockney and his iPhone (and the death of printing?)
« Reply #15 on: February 11, 2011, 05:54:11 pm »

I already have clients that are having shows that incorporate simple I pads hanging on the wall containing slide show sequences of their work, some even with sound content. One guy even carved out a whole the size of the ipad in his 40x60 print and had video going on inside the print itself, attached to the back of the print! This is almost a video sequence format that can be shown anywhere, and just the beginning. With the price drops and increased quality of hd video, even with the Canon 5DM2, there is more and more interest in still photographers gravitating toward that. It can be shown on the web as well as in galleries. Many people, like this client of mine, combine inkjet prints and I pad object type formats in their exhibitions, separate objects working together as a narrative. I kind of like the combination of that approach, something big and physical and tactile and something small and animated bouncing off each other.

The technology has already been developed for very hd roll out screens that can be easily transported or shipped to museums and galleries with tiny hard drives carrying graphics content. Right now these high quality paper thin screens are pretty expensive, but this technology is coming on super fast. They will be available in tiny to giant sizes. With that there will be even more of a blur between still photography, electronic display, and video content in the next couple of years. Some will even propose it is much more environmentally friendly.

I guess it is as collectible as a C print.

This is not the same aesthetic as a beautiful, extremely permanent, well crafted inkjet print on a finely made paper.... But it will certainly be a large part of the "photo based" art market as time goes on and a lot of folks couldn't care less about tactility or longevity as far as that goes. The flood of cheap poorly done Epson prints flooding the market has also greatly contributed to this. Every amateur clown with a 7900 these days is a master "giclee" printer in the eyes of the general public. I guess it had to come.

By the way, those Polaroid SX-70 collages that Hockey was famous for in the 80s are already turning green. The Iris prints of them are also probably just about ready for the trash can. Good thing he did books of em all.

john
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MHMG

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Re: iHockney- Artist David Hockney and his iPhone (and the death of printing?)
« Reply #16 on: February 11, 2011, 07:12:26 pm »


By the way, those Polaroid SX-70 collages that Hockey was famous for in the 80s are already turning green. The Iris prints of them are also probably just about ready for the trash can. Good thing he did books of em all.

john


The one great equalizer between acclaimed contemporary art and the unknown artist producing works with equal or greater artistic merit during the same time period is time itself. As a significant era of accomplishment in our society becomes more delineated through natural attrition, the hindsight of scholarship, and physical losses of art works due to chemical and physical permanence issues, the collective assessment of what is great and what is not gets redefined. I love it when the once overlooked becomes the coveted. How many Americans remember Edward Everett, the featured orator at the dedication ceremony of the National Cemetery in Gettysburg in 1863?  A celebrity in his time, Everett spoke for over two hours, just before President Abraham Lincoln delivered his two-minute Gettysburg Address. Lincoln's Gettysburg address at the time was considered woefully inadequate compared to Everett's long oratorical sermon.

cheers,
Mark
http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com

« Last Edit: February 11, 2011, 07:21:52 pm by MHMG »
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Ernst Dinkla

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Re: iHockney- Artist David Hockney and his iPhone (and the death of printing?)
« Reply #17 on: February 12, 2011, 06:44:11 am »

Acutally, with inkjet-printable OLED arrays around the corner, i think we'll have transparency prints with their own lightsource printed into the substrate in the near future.
All the goodness of transmitted light and the tangible-ness of prints.

Possibly. There is something that tells me it can be overdone with illuminated pieces, not to mention motion pieces. Nice to enter Chartres cathedral once a day for half an hour (medieval video I thought when I entered it again after 30 years), to be in the streets of New York for as long and then get back to the lower stimulations of your own cocoon with some reflective prints on the wall. Couch potatoes may have another opinion. The late Mulisch described our future as brains floating in an iron cast bathtub. I guess he had direct brain video envisioned for that state, 3D Hexachrome to replace reality.

Nobody mentioned Hockney's fax drawings. What I recall is him being late to the party of that technology and overdone publicity for a dull performance. I still like his paintings and related photography. He has the talent and vision. No need for new media in my opinion.


met vriendelijke groeten, Ernst Dinkla

New: Spectral plots of +250 inkjet papers:
http://www.pigment-print.com/spectralplots/spectrumviz_1.htm

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jwwbrennan

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Re: iHockney- Artist David Hockney and his iPhone (and the death of printing?)
« Reply #18 on: February 12, 2011, 09:26:38 am »

As fame and celebrity plunder indiscriminately some well-expressed notions and ideas may be lost to obscurity while less inspired works remain but others are carried forward instead by a series of artists, each one influenced by the previous, none remaining on record. Each one bringing freshness to a great idea rediscovered in a contemporary style for every generation. How often do we see styles copied like recipes rather than ideas re-explored? New is good especially when it actually celebrates something greater than its arrival.
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Jim Brennan

deanwork

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Re: iHockney- Artist David Hockney and his iPhone (and the death of printing?)
« Reply #19 on: February 12, 2011, 10:14:57 am »

The one thing I keep wondering is why Apple has not come out with hd lightweight goggles to plug into the IPhone and IPad. You know kind of a visual Walkman concept. Kind of scary with people crashing their cars into each other but it will happen.

With the increased bandwidth and video compression amazing things are around the corner being transmitted to you from the web ( or Apple I-ART gallery :-). I don't see that as a replacement for paper prints but rather a fantastic way to see an artists work on the fly and learn about art history as well. There is an interesting article in yesterdays NY Times about the new director of the Met wiring the entire museum for wi fi. They are going into that full steam. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/arts/design/12campbell.html?_r=1&ref=arts

When I saw Hockney's stage set designs for the Mozart opera, the Magic Flue I was blown away. What I like about him is his persistence. He never stops updating himself though I never liked his polaroids at all. ( he was also the guy who amplified this controversy about Vermeer's use of the Camera Lucida device in the 17th century to "trace" his interiors. He was in a heated battle with the head of the Met in NY about that. Hockney said, just look at the highlights in those paintings, and he's right. I'm sure Ernst has an opinion about that.....

This guy here is my favorite artist here in Atlanta. His work is deconstructed books and they are amazing objects.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Jk9pHPPJbA&playnext=1&list=PL39C194921C4BE19C







john
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