Artist David Hockney isn't afraid of picking up new media -- over the years, he's used Polaroids, photocollages, and even fax machines to create his art -- in addition to regular, old-fashioned painting. Now, he's taken to using his iPhone to create new works of art. The resultant "paintings" have been exhibited at the Tate Gallery and Royal Academy in London, as well as galleries in Los Angeles and Germany. Like artist Jorge Colombo (whose iPhone fingerpainting was featured on the cover of The New Yorker), Hockney uses the iPhone app Brushes to create his works.
It's always there in my pocket, there's no thrashing about, scrambling for the right color. One can set to work immediately, there's this wonderful impromptu quality, this freshness, to the activity; and when it's over, best of all, there's no mess, no clean-up. You just turn off the machine. Or, even better, you hit Send, and your little cohort of friends around the world gets to experience a similar immediacy. There's something, finally, very intimate about the whole process.
Hollywood star Marlene Dietrich, who added to the perceived glamour of smoking. Photograph: PA
Deborah Arnott is a professional anti-smoker. She makes her living from it. She thinks she can "save lives". Since we all get a lifetime and she is not offering immortality, what she means is you might have a longer life.
Given the choice of 50 years as a free person or 70 years as a slave, she would choose slavery. I wouldn't, and I suspect there are many like me, as most people seem to go for quality of life not quantity. Time, the great mystery, is elastic. Watch the kettle boil and it takes "a long time"...
This quantitative view of life seems dominant today among the medical profession and politicians as though they can and should make these kind of choices for us. It seems a recent phenomenon, and not really very wise. On big issues it might be good, but on small ones it's tyrannical.
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