The Future of Art?

What President Obama calls a "distraction," British artist David Hockney considers his new canvas. Those unfamiliar with Hockney's work may know that he was an early, vocal supporter of the iPhone, simply for the reason that he could use the touchscreen interface to make drawings on the go. (Hockney is no stranger to computer-generated art, as he has been creating larger works with drawing programs over the past several years.) But now Hockney has fully embraced the iPad, and its potential for initiating a renaissance of hand-drawn art.

Hockney told The Standard, "The iPad is far more subtle, in fact it really is like a drawing pad. They will sell by the million. It will change the way we look at everything from reading newspapers to the drawing pad... It can be anything you want it to be. This is the nearest we have got to seeing what I would call a universal machine."
Although some graphics gurus have lamented the fact that the iPad wasn't designed for use with a stylus and doesn't have the ability to load up storage-heavy programs like Photoshop and Illustrator, a bevy of iPad drawing apps have been made available since the gadget's launch. Hockney doesn't say, but if we had to guess, we'd venture that he's using Autodesk SketchBook Pro, or an equivalent app.

Hockney's landscapes over the past several years have had an electric, Expressionism-with-a-hint-of-LSD hyperreal quality in their color palette, so we think that his embrace of tech fits perfectly with his fluorescent perspective. He's even taken to artistic e-mailing by drawing notes on the iPad, but that raises questions for collectors. If one of Hockney's hand-drawn e-mails gets forwarded to a dozen people, does that increase the size of the work's "edition"? Ah, the work of art in the age of digital reproduction. [From: The London Evening Standard]