i really wanted to like this. i love hockney's early drawings, etchings and paintings. i love his photographs. I love his writing about photography and i am indebted forever to his book on the uses of lenses and mirrors in art which completely changed the way i look at many paintings. i love his eagerness, his breadth, his hunger for experiment, even his avuncular curmudgeonliness. but the works here are bland and facile, sunday-painterly in places. in many places, actually. precisely how and why is highlighted by a small gallery of earlier handscapes works. adrian searle, writing in the guardian was right in saying that the mark-marking in the new pictures is monotonous and dauby (i quote from memory). and the ipad drawings / paintings seem a logical extension of this new work because even the paintings have a flatness of surface which looks not greatly different in reproduction. but the mark-marking in the early landscapes is varied and energetic and the surfaces, consequently, much more alive. in fact, the exhibition reminded me that it is the mark-making which has always been the best thing about his pictures. look at the early ecthings - the brothers grimm, a rake's progress - and you'll see that he can draw as well as picasso when the wind is in the right direction. the sheer zest of his early royal college paintings (a vew of switzerland and rocky mountains with tired indians - i may have got the titles wrong; it's the only exhibition i've gone to in a long time for which i haven't wanted to buy the catalogue). even the mullholland drive pictures where different sections are all painted using different techniques. this section also contains three photographic joiners, two of the grand canyon and pearlblossom highway which were, for me, the best things in the exhibition.

i was going to paste an image here. then i clicked onto david hockney's 'authorised' website, the front page of which insists that you tick a box to confirm that you agree to the statement: this site and contents are copyright david hockney and may not be reproduced anywhere at any time in any form, which must be the sourest, least generous and most unwelcome welcome to a multi-millionaire's website i have ever seen.

so here's a picture of a fantastic self portrait by marlene dumas (het kwaad is banaal, evil is banal, 1984) which is better than everything in the hockney exhibition put together.

i am constantly amazed by our ability to become rapidly blase about technological near-miracles which would have seemed mind-bendingly inconceivable a few years previously. yesterday i watched puss in boots with my son and a friend of his (it was, by the by, rather good and i iaughed out loud on several occasions). there was utterly convincing fur. lots of it. there was an utterly convincing bowl of milk hurled onto the floor in close-up. there were utterly convincing mouths of which we saw the utterly convincing interiors. there was 3d which was not so convincing in my case because i have eccentric fixation in one eye, but i still have to buy and wear those bloody glasses to stop the screen looking fuzzy, but there was 3d nevertheless. these things were impossible only a few years ago. in 2004 i wrote a tv adaptation of raymond briggs's fungus the bogeyman and the whole project was, frankly, hobbled by the impossibility of doing any kind of liquid in cgi, and unpleasant liquids of all kinds are an essential part of the whole bogey world. but now...? for brief periods i sat watching the film godsmacked by what i was seeing. seconds later, of course, i returned to a passive mindless state of blase acceptance.

later in the evening i played, or rather attempted to play, my first xbox game. l a noire (this mostly involved failing to steer a police car). again, brief periods of gobsmackedness, followed seconds later by another dead pedestrian. i remember playing asteroids as a student on those glass pub-tables-come-games-consoles. white lines on a lack background. irregular polygons moving around and getting broken up. period

(in my defence i would like to say that i also read a few chapters of middlemarch and made some bread this morning).

which is perhaps why sci-fi is different now. there's simply no mileage in suggesting how thrilling the future might be, because we know that when we invent matter tranport we'll be using it to get instantaneous deliveries of green beans from kenya and whining about the fact that a coiuple of them are a bit brown.

second serving (see gaylord draxo below; and apologies to speakers of any language in which any of these are acceptable and humdrum names and therefore not funny at all):

byrom gorner,  derrin dorrit, ramon babcock, farlay peebles, fransisco hee-sub, christof pup, ginger dupree, bordy nora, baird olvin, anurag moose, humus grub, flavius shu, grubbs homan, pollock dusty, lalo mundeep, cinderella clementina...

the cultural highlights (in my immediate vicinity anyway):

feeling pissed off (and slightly stupid for not having hitherto realised) that the bp national portrait award doesn't accept work in gouache on paper. not sure whether it's snobbery, a disinclination to handle breakable works or an attempt to keep the floodgates closed. i wonder whether the award should be more honestly renamed (i quote and edit verbatim-ish from the smallprint) the bp paintings-predominantly-of-the-human-figure-in-oil-comma-tempera-or-acrylic-comma-on-a-stretcher-or-board-comma-preferably-framed-and-definitely-not-on-paper-comma-unglazed-and-definitely-not-watercolour-or-pastels award. oh well, i guess it eliminates the queasy competing-for-oil-money quandary...