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Between pages 10 and 11, your own Hockney original "Two Apples & One Lemon & Four Flowers"

Tuesday 07 January 1997 00:02 GMT
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The David Hockney NewsPrint published in the centre of today's Independent Tabloid is not a reproduction - a photograph of something else. It is the artwork itself. How, in a newspaper, can that be so?

Hockney has provided us with four separate pieces of work, all in black and white. Each corresponds with one of the four colours of the printing process - cyan, magenta, black and yellow. The print itself only exists once the presses roll.

Hockney has long been fascinated by the processes of picture-making and argues that "even though it's printed in a mechanical way on a page in a newspaper, it's constructed only to exist in that way". Where a print of a Cezanne is not the real thing, this is the real thing.

There are, of course, rather a lot of the real things this morning, so what, if anything, is it worth? This picture has been used once before in a similar way in Los Angeles, in 1988, but the vast majority of examples have long since disappeared. One is shown, however, well framed and hung, in David Hockney's current exhibition in Manchester - and looks very good. The money-value of the print depends on how many remain, and in what condition, many years hence. The real value depends on how much you like it.

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