The same week that David Hockney died at 88, Hyperallergic also reported the passing of photographer Duane Michals at 94. Two artists, two mediums, six decades each, and a shared refusal to let their respective disciplines define the ceiling of what they could attempt. That refusal is what made them both extraordinary, and it is worth sitting with rather than archiving.
Medium as Constraint, Not Identity
Hockney spent his career treating painting as a perpetually renewable proposition. Swimming pools as geometry. iPad drawings as plein air practice. His late work with the iPhone was not nostalgia tourism. It was curiosity that had not calcified into method. Michals was, if anything, more radical: he introduced narrative text into photography at a moment when the field was still defending its claim to objectivity. He understood, earlier than most, that a photograph is not a document. It is a sentence fragment that needs the rest of the paragraph. Both artists were, in the deepest sense, literary. They worked in images but thought in sequences.
What Longevity Actually Requires
The art world's talent retention crisis, as documented by Artnet this week, gains a sharper edge when placed alongside these obituaries. The system that struggles to keep mid-career women in the field also produced the conditions under which Hockney and Michals thrived: a combination of early institutional recognition and the freedom to work outside the institution's approval thereafter. Long careers are not made by institutions. They are made despite them. Tom Sachs on sympathetic magic and treating the whole practice as one ongoing scrapbook captures this disposition precisely: the artists who last are the ones who never stopped treating their work as fundamentally unfinished. Hockney and Michals both died mid-sentence, which is the only way to die well if you are an artist.