Say David Hockney is Full of Shit Three Times.

Perhaps you've been as irritated as me that the David Hockney assertion (in the book Secret Knowledge) that the bulk of the old master paintings were traced from the camera obscura's lens projection, was uncritically accepted by the mainstream press as an all too-common "debunking" of the master artists of the past. Perhaps this irritated you deeply.

I saw Stanford optics professor David Stork demolish this analysis six ways from Tuesday in a lecture last year, and it's now published in this month's Scientific American.

When this came up, I reminded my class "David Hockney is full of shit" three whole times. Partly this was strategic: No crutches, please. Drawing, my loyal charges, is a direct documentation of the vast intricacies of human visual awareness, not a Warhol coloring book.

This doesn't mean that the lens wasn't ever used for this purpose, but look at the work - most of the painting spaces are obviously invented, complex, compressed, collected, done in low raking light insufficient to illuminate an image in a simple lens. You can be damn sure that ceiling frescoes may have skipped out on the renaissance hi-tech. And how, exactly, DO YOU MIX PAINT IN THE DARK?

The lens was undoubtedly was experimented with often. But ultimately Hockney's contention is, as you might expect for a Pop Art holdover, incredibly self-serving. As Prof. Z put it to me: "Hockney can't draw, so he doesn't want to think anyone else can either."

So there. Stick that in your bowl-cut, Brit-Boy.