David Hockney | Tracey Emin | David Cameron | Classical music
Hockney is in trouble in these pages (Letters, 11 and 13 May) for thinking it was Derrida’s quip that painting is dead, when the sentiment has been around for 400 years. But in a recent catalogue to a show of his work in Paris, the French curator Donatien Grau explains that Hockney’s reference to Derrida is to the gist of Derrida’s set of essays La Vérité en Peinture of 1978. This gist is that “the legitimacy of painting as representation” had been broken at the time of the “birth of modernity” – a claim that Hockney manifestly resists and in his work triumphantly refutes. His reference to Derrida is precise and apt.
Jonathon Brown
Duranus, France
• Tracey Emin – what a star (‘This is mine, I own it’, 13 May). Having been decolonised and stomatised a couple of years ago, I found that it is surprising what you take in your stride and what you miss after such a change in your bodily functioning. For me, the greatest loss has been the relaxing 15 minutes on the loo in the morning with the Guardian crossword. I do it in bed now before getting up, but it’s not the same.
James Lindesay
Leicester
