David Hockney has died, and there has died with him an artist whose work has given those of us who are not artists a very great deal of pleasure, in striking contrast to most art that wins prizes these days.

The ancient Greeks did not have a word for ‘art’. The closest they got to it was tekhnê (cf. ‘technical’), brilliantly defined by Aristotle as ‘the trained ability to produce something under the guidance of rational thought’, always difficult to discern in the work of most modern artists.........

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