The Red & White

When David Hockney’s iPad drawings sold for over £6 million at Sotheby’s this month, the art world once again applauded the fusion of technology and tradition. Seventeen digital prints from The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire (2011), each originally drawn on an iPad, fetched prices that rival the cost of an Old Master painting. Collectors celebrated this as proof that digital art had “arrived.” I’m not so sure.

There’s no denying Hockney’s genius or his lifelong curiosity about new tools. From Polaroids to fax machines, he’s always experimented. But does that mean every digital sketch deserves to sell for six figures? Unlike oil on canvas, these iPad works can be endlessly reproduced with identical precision. Their creation requires talent, yes—but this contrasts with the usual “scarceness” in a work that gives it value. The market seems to be rewarding Hockney’s fame more than the actual artistic process.

To be honest, buying a digital print for £300,000 feels like buying a signed screenshot. But, just like the banana, people buy it. Art itself has already lost its value; the true value is about having something that others don’t have.

Whether I like it or not, this marks another turning point in modern art. The industry we call art has become a business of branding, a marketplace where the medium matters less than the signature attached to it. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence generating “art” at the tap of a prompt, creation itself is becoming frictionless. Ironically, this ease might push artists back toward older, slower, more tactile forms as a kind of rebellion against the infinite reproducibility of the screen.

If this trend continues, art risks losing its soul to the market’s newest gadget. Perhaps, before we celebrate the million pound iPad drawing, we should pause to ask what exactly we’re applauding: the art, the artist, or simply the price tag that now defines them both.