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Artists worked out that smoking represented death centuries before doctors did. That's why they love it so much, says Jonathan Jones
Jump to full article: The Guardian (uk), 2007-05-14
Author: Jonathan Jones
Intro: 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.
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