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Burning issue: Hockney’s iPhone artwork
When David Hockney read Austin Mitchell's whinge in The Oldie about how MPs are being unfairly treated as lepers, he scribbled back an ironic blast in response on the Government's "new instructions" to smokers and the stubborn temptations of a cigarette.
Here is an extract from his letter to the Grimsby MP.
Dear Austin
I read your piece in the Oldie and I was a bit sympathetic. The thing is Austin, that people can be very ungrateful about some things, and after all they don't always know about your work to clean up things, clear the air so to speak.
I know you voted to get rid of all the smokers from pubs. I don't know for sure how it's working as I don't go out too much now . . .
I keep thinking what it was like before your good work. Think of it: people sitting at the front in a nightclub with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and was it Sammy Davis Jr? All, believe it or not, smoking while they were actually singing ... They even had the cheek to sing about smoke getting in the eyes.
What must it have been like? Thank goodness we won't have that again. It must have been torture for some, and not knowing 30 years later that that cough had its source in a song many years before. . . .
I sometimes ponder your plans with the smokers. The trouble for me is the moment I ponder, the weed comes up ... You can get carried away by that kind of thing, the drifting smoke wandering in all directions, the lovely shapes interlocked; you sometimes don't see the reality, which I know can be too harsh.
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Cigarette-maker BAT has built up an impressive collection of modern art at its factory in the Dutch town of Zevenaar over the last 50 years. The art was used to keep workers from getting bored. But now the factory is closing, the art is up for auction and many are unhappy.
Cigarette brands Peter Stuyvesant and Lucky Strike will no longer be made in the Dutch town of Zevenaar. The closure of the British American Tobacco (BAT) factory marks not only the end of a major source of employment in the area but also the final curtain for an unusual piece of Dutch art history.
At the end of the 1950s, factory director Alexander Orlow started hanging works of art among the cigarette-making machines. The workers needed something interesting to look at to stave off boredom and increase their productivity, he felt.
Dutch photographer Maarten Dors met the limits of free speech at Yahoo Inc.'s photo-sharing service, Flickr, when he posted an image of an early-adolescent boy with disheveled hair and a ragged T-shirt, staring blankly with a lit cigarette in his mouth.
Without prior notice, Yahoo deleted the photo on grounds it violated an unwritten ban on depicting children smoking. Dors eventually convinced a Yahoo manager that - far from promoting smoking - the photo had value as a statement on poverty and street life in Romania. Yet another employee deleted it again a few months later.
"I never thought of it as a photo of a smoking kid," Dors said. "It was just of a kid in Romania and how his life is. You can never make a serious documentary if you always have to think about what Flickr will delete." . . .
First Amendment protections generally do not extend to private property in the physical world, allowing a shopping mall to legally kick out a customer wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a smoking child.
With online services becoming greater conduits than shopping malls for public communications, however, some advocacy groups believe the federal government needs to guarantee open access to speech.
For four decades, as New York’s arts scene flourished, the most reliable source of corporate funds for the city’s dance companies, theaters and art museums was the Philip Morris Companies, maker of the world’s most popular cigarette.
At first, some arts groups hesitated to take funds from a tobacco company. But most of them got over it, and now more than 200 organizations in New York, including many known for experimental work, receive a total of about $7 million every year from the company known for the last few years as the Altria Group.
That money is about to go away as Altria prepares to move its headquarters out of New York because of a corporate reorganization of its tobacco business.
The city's arts world is bracing for the money to run out. Arts groups as varied as the Urban Bush Women in Brooklyn and the Dance Theater Workshop in Manhattan are hustling to find other companies, hedge funds or real estate developers to replace Altria's grants. . . .
Nationally, Altria ranked 11th in corporate giving last year with about $200 million in cash and in-kind donations, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy.
Besides plowing millions into the arts across the country, Altria has been a major contributor to domestic violence shelters, hunger programs and disaster relief.
Our program is not about our products; it's about reputation. Creativity and innovation are some of our greatest attributes. What better way to reflect that than to support the arts?Jennifer P. Goodale, Altria's vice president for contributions, on the company's corporate contributions program.
Here's what it was -- the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.David Parsons, co-founder and artistic director of Parsons Dance, on a donation from Philip Morris in 1985 that gave his new dance company a much-needed "shot in the arm."
It is unlikely that Altria will be funding arts organizations in New York in the future because, as far as we know, there will be no Altria corporate contributions program, which is a result of the decentralization we've been working on over the past few years. Jennifer P. Goodale, a former actress who is Altria's vice president for contributions, in an e-mail message to a reporter.
Smoking in art is an emblem of mortality. And yet art is strongly in the pro-smoking lobby: just because something kills you doesn't mean it isn't beautiful or at least "sublime". Puritans and do-gooders have never been associated with creativity. It is no coincidence that one of the most prominent pro-smokers in Britain is David Hockney; and he is just one of many artists who can't do without nicotine. Some, such as Sarah Lucas, have made a virtue of it . . .
Artists have become more interested in smoking the more disreputable it has become. As the US anti-smoking lobby gained momentum in the 1990s, aesthetes and artists stood up for smoke. In 1994, Richard Klein published his book Cigarettes Are Sublime, a sophisticated argument for the cultural richness and poetry of the smoking experience. I don't want to sound like a paranoid anti-smoker, but in the US it was published by Duke University Press in Durham, North Carolina . . .
Yet the trouble with the idea of the sublime is that you really need to have no sense of humour to quite believe in it. . . .
Smoking was in no way associated with death in Hogarth's day - no studies had yet proved anything bad about it - yet he intuitively associates it with decay and decline, with time running out. He engraved a single word coming out of Time's mouth: "Finis", meaning the end. It looks like a puff of cigarette smoke.
It's rough, but for two months now French law has banned smoking - except in restaurants, discothèques, casinos, cafés and bars. In 2008 even these havens will disappear.
Some European countries have been more stringent, and their citizens' sufferings less plangent, but smoking has been part of the very fabric of French civilization since 1561, when Jean Nicot (who gave his name to nicotine) brought tobacco from Portugal to ease the sick headaches of Queen Catherine de Médicis. After airbrushing iconic cigarette butts from photographs of Sartre and Malraux, will the next step be to remove the clay pipes from the paintings of Teniers in the Louvre?, wonders Tigrane Hadengue, founder with Michka Seeliger-Chatelain of the Musée du Fumeur in the 11th arrondissement of Paris.
Possibly. Already café owners have been urged to augment cigarette counters with pinball and foosball machines, pharmacies are hustling patches, vaporizers and pills, and workers who sneak a puff in office doorways have been warned that they face a €183, or $243, fine, inflicted by 90 plainclothes enforcers, for tossing butts on the pavement. "The streets of Paris must never become one giant ashtray," a city official said. . . .
Temporary selling exhibitions include tobacco-leaf paintings of Mayan gods by Frédéric Dagain and reproductions of caricatures of famous smokers. There is also a room upstairs that can be rented for parties and is especially popular with publishers, Michka says, since they all like to smoke. "Just try to stop them," she says.
On January 31, the board of the Altria Group — the parent company of Philip Morris USA and Philip Morris International — will announce the exact timing of its spin-off of Kraft Foods, the first stage in a large corporate restructuring. What this has to do with the arts landscape in New York City might not be immediately clear — until one looks at the list of cultural organizations that Altria has supported, and which may not continue receiving support once its individual operating companies control the philanthropic purse. At the top are the Whitney Museum ($557,000 in 2005), the Brooklyn Academy of Music ($389,000), the Brooklyn Museum ($345,000), Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts ($272,000), Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater ($305,700), the New Museum of Contemporary Art ($210,000), New York City Opera ($265,000), El Museo del Barrio ($313,500), Dance Theatre Workshop ($194,105), and Shakespeare in the Park ($100,000).
A spokeswoman for Altria, Lisa Gonzalez, said that approximately 56% of the 272 arts organizations that have received grants in the past will receive them this year. Some have already been informed that they won't be receiving further grants; others are waiting to hear in the coming months. That is only the short-term, however. Organizations like BAM, which has had a 25-year history with Altria/ Philip Morris, are contemplating a long-term future in which the parent company may cease to exist.
Our hope is that, based on the huge success of this kind of sponsorship, other corporations whose mission incorporates innovation and creativity will step in and generously support contemporary art and ideas. The Whitney Museum's spokeswoman, Jan Rothschild, on the loss of arts funding when ALtria splits its companies.
Westin Hotels & Resorts is marking the six-month milestone of its smoke-free conversion in North America with Breathing Lights(SM) installations in its lobbies nationwide. The artistically designed projections count the number of fresh breaths taken by each Westin guest each day. The design can be viewed by guests and visitors to Westin lobbies nationwide, or by visiting www.westin.com/breathe.
Westin became the first major hotel chain to convert all of its smoking rooms in North America to smoke-free late last year, investing more than $3 million in its smoke free initiative. The move comes as part of Westin's commitment to guests' personal well-being and the brand's positioning around Renewal. Since then, Westin hotels in Australia, Fiji and Scotland have also become smoke-free.
The Breathing Lights projection on a wall or other hotel space features a blue light that pulses at the average speed of healthy human breathing, every 4.4 seconds. For a period of three months, each "breath" will tick up a counter displayed in the center of the projection, representing the number of fresh, smoke-free breaths taken in the hotel that day.
The National Museum of Health and Medicine recently opened "Cartoonists Take Up Smoking," an exhibition of original newspaper editorial cartoons on a single theme, presented by Alan Blum, M.D., one of the nation's foremost authorities on the history of the tobacco industry and the battle over smoking.
The exhibit retraces the 40-year battle over the use and promotion of cigarettes since the publication of the landmark Surgeon General's report on smoking and health in 1964. The exhibit also addresses complacency on the part of organized medicine, politicians, and the mass media in ending the tobacco pandemic. . . .
Can You Cartoon? We asked visitors to the exhibition to draw their own cartoons about smoking to hang in the gallery.
you only need to imagine the fallout if the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra or the National Gallery of Victoria mounted an exhibition about, say, cigarette-smoking in art. It's not hard to envisage radio talkback hosts inciting boycotts, the Australian Medical Association issuing admonishing statements, politicians responding with threats of funding cuts and hapless gallery directors going to ground.
And yet, a moment's reflection reveals it to be an entirely legitimate and, indeed, revelatory theme, and it took the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, one of Australia's smaller but more courageous regional galleries, to prove it.
Warning: Smoking is an exhibition that takes as its theme the visual culture of smoking in (mostly) Australian (mostly) 20th-century art.
It neither condones nor condemns the habit that James I of England described as "a custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmfull to the braine and dangerous to the lungs".
But it is a brilliant show that contains, aside from a pleasing array of obscure surprises, a sprinkling of Australian art's most famous images: Charles Blackman's The Cigarette Shop (Running Home), Brett Whiteley's Self-Portrait in the Studio, Olive Cotton's Max After Surfing, and Sidney Nolan's Head of a Gallipoli Soldier with Cigarette. . . .
There is, of course, much to be said for coming to new and sensible conclusions about the dangers of smoking, its social abrasiveness and the manifest evils of tobacco companies. But the way such ideas take hold in our society has something unreal and often frightening about it. . . . .
Rodney James, the curator of this show, has chosen works that illustrate all this brilliantly without ever making us feel subjected to a lesson. Almost all the works hold their own; they contain their own contradictions and refuse merely to illustrate ideas. . . .
Every night I read to my son a book called Goodnight Moon. It's a classic children's bedtime book, first published in the US in 1947, and read to millions of young children around the world ever since. The back flap has a small black-and-white photo of the author, Margaret Wise Brown, and the illustrator, Clement Hurd. In our copy, Hurd has a cigarette in his hand. But as of this year, new copies of the book will continue to include the photo, with the cigarette digitally removed.
'WARNING: smoking has been linked to some of the most powerful images of the 20th century." This is the monitory title of a daring exhibition at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery. It contains 70 winsome artworks on the controversial theme of smoking.
It's a brave move for a gallery to organise a show on smoking. In today's sanitary climate, you do not mount exhibitions that might in any way glamorise the disgusting habit of charging the lungs with carcinogens. . . .
Indeed so tough are the anti-smoking publicity laws that the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery has found the show's jovial and ironic title rather a show stopper for one TV film crew. The story was written, the film crew arrived and the interviews took place. Alas, the footage was never screened. Apparently the television station feared the legal implications of running the story. Controversy normally appeals to the media but the story was withdrawn so as not to offend the law.
What the legal department was worried about I cannot pinpoint. After all, the gallery doesn't sell tobacco and hasn't been receiving any sponsorship from tobacco companies. The exhibition can't easily be seen as intentionally promoting sales of cigarettes. But then it's also conceivable that when it comes to prohibitions on publicity for smoking, there isn't exactly a superabundance of humour. Where the law cuts out, moral zeal takes over. We have to be very straight-faced and unequivocal in our condemnation . . .
At the beginning of his essay, James admiringly quotes E. C. Corti from 1930 in his book A History of Smoking: "It would afford me the liveliest pleasure should the reader, after finishing my book, find himself unable to decide whether I am a smoker or not."
Many of the works, if anything, stigmatise smoking. Take a sculpture by Stuart Ringholt. It's a cigarette with a dummy attached to it.
There would be no bohemia without smoking,” said David Hockney at the Labour party’s Brighton conference last September. Now, in an interview for the December/ January edition of the art magazine Modern Painters, he repeats his belief that smoking and art enjoy a uniquely meaningful relationship. A particularly dotty thesis, it may seem, but art history can furnish it with some lively supporting footnotes. . . .
The clay pipe is everywhere in these works and, as with every object in Dutch 17th-century art, tobacco came freighted with moral significance. . . .
For the next two centuries, aside from Hogarth’s satires and some luminous studies of smoking materials by Jean Chardin, tobacco has a low profile in European art. It reappears in the mid-19th century with the arrival of Edouard Manet and friends . . .
I have not been able to track down the first cigarette in art, though the earliest significant painting in which a woman smokes one may be Manet’s “Gypsy with a Cigarette”, from 1862. But it was not until the first world war that fags became associated with female emancipation. . . .
“Has smoking any more to do with a woman’s morals than has the colour of her hair?” a Marlboro ad from 1925 demanded to know. . . .
. As ever, Damien Hirst took the lead, promoting smoking in the magazine The Idler in 1995 as an effective act of revolt, an authentic shock tactic of unplanned suicide. His sculpture “Party Time” . . .
But a major new canvas, on show until the end of January at London’s Gagosian Gallery, has come along to provide Hockney with one bang up-to-the-minute vindication, a restatement of his argument about tobacco and art in the language of paint itself. It is by the New York-based Neapolitan Francesco Clemente
Gruesome Canadian images of tobacco-damaged gums, lungs and hearts will form part of an exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Canada's health ministry said on Friday.
The graphic images appear as health warnings on Canadian cigarette packs, and they will now be part of a MoMA exhibition on objects designed to protect the mind and body from dangerous or stressful influences.
"I am very proud that these labels have been recognized as being among some of the most innovative contemporary designs in the world," Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh said in a statement. . . .
Pictures of the warnings can be found at http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/hl-vs/tobac-tabac/legislation/label-etiqu ette/graph/index_e.html.
I am very proud that these labels have been recognized as being among some of the most innovative contemporary designs in the world.Canadian Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh, on the exhibition of gruesome Canadian images of tobacco-damaged gums, lungs and hearts which will form part of an exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
An exhibit of editorial cartoons dealing with smoking and tobacco use is on display at the Alabama Museum of the Health Sciences on the UAB (University of Alabama at Birmingham) campus. Featuring more than 40 original editorial cartoons by nationally known cartoonists, the show includes smoking-related items from the collection of the University of Alabama Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society, including front-page headlines that inspired the cartoons, cigarette ads and other smoking-related items.
“Cartoonists Take Up Smoking” retraces the modern era of anti-smoking advocacy, as seen through the eyes of newspaper editorial cartoonists.
“These works of art have satirized tobacco company executives and lobbyists, from their sabotage of clean indoor air legislation and airline smoking bans to their circumvention of restrictions on cigarette advertising and political contributions,” said Alan Blum, M.D., director of the Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society. “But the cartoons also poke fun at the intolerance shown by some anti-smoking crusaders and expose the hypocrisy of state attorneys-general seeking cash damages from an industry with whom the states had long been in cahoots. Above all, editorial cartoonists have revealed that the most addictive thing about tobacco is money.”
The cutting edge of laughter can be good medicine. Turned another way, that scalpel becomes a weapon.
Dr. Alan Blum has fought smoking and tobacco companies for the better part of three decades as founder of DOC (Doctors Ought to Care) and the director of the University of Alabama Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society.
Armed with a MAD Magazine-like comic sense, Blum satirized campaigns showing smokers as successful, sexy, healthy people by creating his own series of posters with smokers baring grotesquely yellowed teeth and by sponsoring the Emphysema Slims Tennis Tournament, the Dead Man Chew Softball Tournament and the U.S. Boomerang Team.