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| David Hockney may be a great painter but don’t listen to him on matters of health | David Hockney may be a great painter but don’t listen to him on matters of health |
| (2 days later) | |
| After decades going on about the joys of smoking, it was oh-so predictable he’d leap on it as a potential cure | After decades going on about the joys of smoking, it was oh-so predictable he’d leap on it as a potential cure |
| “Pictorial warnings work,” says the World Health Organization, of the tumours, coffins and rotting teeth that decorate cigarette packets. “Pictorial warnings significantly increase people’s awareness of the harms from tobacco use.” | “Pictorial warnings work,” says the World Health Organization, of the tumours, coffins and rotting teeth that decorate cigarette packets. “Pictorial warnings significantly increase people’s awareness of the harms from tobacco use.” |
| Pictorial warnings, meet David Hockney. Recent, widely acclaimed work by the dedicated smoker has depicted blossom, nature, the consolations of spring. In France, where the artist currently lives, the pictures inspired a competition for young artists, designed, its organiser Ruth Mackenzie explained, to cheer people suffering Covid-enforced lockdown: “It just seemed a lovely idea to share his fantastic spirit of optimism and hope and colour.” | Pictorial warnings, meet David Hockney. Recent, widely acclaimed work by the dedicated smoker has depicted blossom, nature, the consolations of spring. In France, where the artist currently lives, the pictures inspired a competition for young artists, designed, its organiser Ruth Mackenzie explained, to cheer people suffering Covid-enforced lockdown: “It just seemed a lovely idea to share his fantastic spirit of optimism and hope and colour.” |
| As for Hockney, he has also been inspired this springtime to renew his defence of smoking and to inveigh, again, against its “mean-spirited bossy dreary” opponents, and their misuse of cigarette packets. “Some of them are just plainly ridiculous,” he wrote last week. “A picture of a man in a hospital bed with his wife and children round him is suggesting surely that sorrow and grief would disappear if only people would stop smoking.” On the contrary, he argues on smoking’s behalf: “Love life.” | As for Hockney, he has also been inspired this springtime to renew his defence of smoking and to inveigh, again, against its “mean-spirited bossy dreary” opponents, and their misuse of cigarette packets. “Some of them are just plainly ridiculous,” he wrote last week. “A picture of a man in a hospital bed with his wife and children round him is suggesting surely that sorrow and grief would disappear if only people would stop smoking.” On the contrary, he argues on smoking’s behalf: “Love life.” |
| Hockney, we learn, is not the only one delighting in reports suggesting that (“surprise, surprise”, he writes) smokers may, for reasons not yet known, be underrepresented among people with Covid-19. To the point that French researchers will trial nicotine patches to test for any preventative effect. “Could there be something in this?” Hockney asks, ignoring contradictory warnings that (a) the figures could be wrong and (b) smokers are at increased risk from the infection and (c) up to half of tobacco users will, virus or no virus, die of the habit. “Well,” he writes, as if to conclude the matter, “the only time I had the flu was 1969, the year I didn’t smoke.” | Hockney, we learn, is not the only one delighting in reports suggesting that (“surprise, surprise”, he writes) smokers may, for reasons not yet known, be underrepresented among people with Covid-19. To the point that French researchers will trial nicotine patches to test for any preventative effect. “Could there be something in this?” Hockney asks, ignoring contradictory warnings that (a) the figures could be wrong and (b) smokers are at increased risk from the infection and (c) up to half of tobacco users will, virus or no virus, die of the habit. “Well,” he writes, as if to conclude the matter, “the only time I had the flu was 1969, the year I didn’t smoke.” |
| This latest defence of smoking, and attack on the “bossy boots” pictures trying to stop it, appeared in the Daily Mail, the Guardian having, apparently, politely passed on this chance to reinforce a message that, aside from representing a health hazard, does not exactly cast new light on the artist. For years, in his newspaper letters and public appearances, Britain’s most celebrated living painter has doubled as Big Tobacco’s greatest asset: a militant smoker who has become only more valuable as smoking bans have proliferated, health warnings intensified, and less fortunate famous smokers died prematurely. Interviews ran under titles like “Smoking with David Hockney”, “No smoke without ire”, “The fuming man” . The longer he smokes and works, with the gloriously life-enhancing results recognised by Mackenzie, the more Hockney doubles as precious evidence that heroic smoking can occasionally, even as it kills, maims and impoverishes millions of others, be compatible with undimmed genius, energy, and looking spectacularly good at the age of 82. | This latest defence of smoking, and attack on the “bossy boots” pictures trying to stop it, appeared in the Daily Mail, the Guardian having, apparently, politely passed on this chance to reinforce a message that, aside from representing a health hazard, does not exactly cast new light on the artist. For years, in his newspaper letters and public appearances, Britain’s most celebrated living painter has doubled as Big Tobacco’s greatest asset: a militant smoker who has become only more valuable as smoking bans have proliferated, health warnings intensified, and less fortunate famous smokers died prematurely. Interviews ran under titles like “Smoking with David Hockney”, “No smoke without ire”, “The fuming man” . The longer he smokes and works, with the gloriously life-enhancing results recognised by Mackenzie, the more Hockney doubles as precious evidence that heroic smoking can occasionally, even as it kills, maims and impoverishes millions of others, be compatible with undimmed genius, energy, and looking spectacularly good at the age of 82. |
| How do you even calculate the value of this proselytising? Except to say that it would probably rank midway between a defiant confession, by Sir David Attenborough, that he’s been on 60 a day since he was 12 – and actively enjoyed blowing smoke up the beaks of grateful penguins – and a theatrical version of this message from Dame Judi Dench. | How do you even calculate the value of this proselytising? Except to say that it would probably rank midway between a defiant confession, by Sir David Attenborough, that he’s been on 60 a day since he was 12 – and actively enjoyed blowing smoke up the beaks of grateful penguins – and a theatrical version of this message from Dame Judi Dench. |
| In fact, three decades after I quit smoking, any love letter to cigarettes from Hockney is apt to prompt the same question, momentarily, as the sight of a beautiful person smoking in a classic film: why did I ever stop? With the added impact that comes of Hockney being – unlike Bogart, lighter of Bacall’s innumerable fags in To Have and Have Not – ostensibly undamaged, and working, and reverently reported in places that would normally avoid celebrating sickness. Shortly before it made space for Hockney’s latest tribute to tobacco, the Daily Mail had referred to 5G conspiracy theorists as “coronavirus cranks”; it warned, correctly, that “anti-vaxxers are already peddling bizarre theories about Covid-19 vaccine BEFORE it even exists”. | In fact, three decades after I quit smoking, any love letter to cigarettes from Hockney is apt to prompt the same question, momentarily, as the sight of a beautiful person smoking in a classic film: why did I ever stop? With the added impact that comes of Hockney being – unlike Bogart, lighter of Bacall’s innumerable fags in To Have and Have Not – ostensibly undamaged, and working, and reverently reported in places that would normally avoid celebrating sickness. Shortly before it made space for Hockney’s latest tribute to tobacco, the Daily Mail had referred to 5G conspiracy theorists as “coronavirus cranks”; it warned, correctly, that “anti-vaxxers are already peddling bizarre theories about Covid-19 vaccine BEFORE it even exists”. |
| But it’s easy to forget that the Mail is edited by someone who, when he’s not supervising the paper’s war on lefties and foreigners, tireless persecution of luvvies and – most unforgivable – “remoaner luvvies”, lives for art. Or, at any rate, its most eminent older creators. Geordie Greig, the former boon companion of, among others, Lucian Freud and VS Naipaul, is a close friend of Hockney. Perhaps naturally, he sympathised with the painter’s indignation on having to have his thoughts published in the Mail, rather than the Guardian. | |
| “David Hockney accuses newspaper of censorship,” ran the Mail headline. “It’s shocking,” Hockney told Greig, in a story eagerly tweeted by the industry-funded Forest, “that their agenda doesn’t allow them to engage in open debate on this.” | “David Hockney accuses newspaper of censorship,” ran the Mail headline. “It’s shocking,” Hockney told Greig, in a story eagerly tweeted by the industry-funded Forest, “that their agenda doesn’t allow them to engage in open debate on this.” |
| Nor, he might have added, is he alone, as an unconventional health thinker, in being subjected to this sort of disrespectful treatment. As Index on Censorship will be aware, groundbreaking speculation of all kinds has been marginalised if not effectively suppressed during this crisis, for no better reason than it might be injurious to life. Donald Trump was denied serious examination of the protective properties of injected bleach, the martyrdom of David Icke continues, the musician MIA was dropped by Vogue (for preferring death to vaccines), the self-styled rule-breaker Eamonn Holmes is neutered by Ofcom. And unlike Hockney’s, their alleged censors can’t invariably cite decades of research proving their proposals would kill millions of people. Though, if I understand him in the Mail, cigarette-related benefits and casualties are alike irrelevant to his main point, a firm rejection of Housman’s “And since to look at things in bloom/Fifty springs are little room”. Hockney informs the medical establishment: “It is the intensity of life that counts, not longevity.” | Nor, he might have added, is he alone, as an unconventional health thinker, in being subjected to this sort of disrespectful treatment. As Index on Censorship will be aware, groundbreaking speculation of all kinds has been marginalised if not effectively suppressed during this crisis, for no better reason than it might be injurious to life. Donald Trump was denied serious examination of the protective properties of injected bleach, the martyrdom of David Icke continues, the musician MIA was dropped by Vogue (for preferring death to vaccines), the self-styled rule-breaker Eamonn Holmes is neutered by Ofcom. And unlike Hockney’s, their alleged censors can’t invariably cite decades of research proving their proposals would kill millions of people. Though, if I understand him in the Mail, cigarette-related benefits and casualties are alike irrelevant to his main point, a firm rejection of Housman’s “And since to look at things in bloom/Fifty springs are little room”. Hockney informs the medical establishment: “It is the intensity of life that counts, not longevity.” |
| It may do little to mollify the artist, but any less eminent smoker would long ago have lost credibility on this particular theme, well before Covid-19 denied many of his contemporaries one last sight of blossom. | It may do little to mollify the artist, but any less eminent smoker would long ago have lost credibility on this particular theme, well before Covid-19 denied many of his contemporaries one last sight of blossom. |
| • Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist | • Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist |
| • This article was amended on 25 May 2020 to remove reference to a newspaper headline, “Did Michel Barnier infect Boris Johnson?”, which was wrongly attributed to the Daily Mail; it was in fact a Mail on Sunday story. |
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