Summer, 1988. New York City is sweltering. Many of the beaches in Brooklyn and on Long Island are closed as sewage and hospital wastes mysteriously wash ashore. Ecosystems are collapsing. In the art world as well, trash keeps rising to the surface. Art in America’s special number, devoted to “Art and Money,” hits the newsstands. It’s a report on the many ways in which the art market is running out of control. The tone approaches celebration: one man’s calamity is another man’s triumph. Meanwhile, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, David Hockney, who knows something about sunbathing and something about art-and-money, is the subject of a retrospective that opened in June, before people had begun leaving town.[1]If anyone stuck in the city opts for Hockney on one of those weekends when the beaches are closed, they’ll probably look a little unkindly on his idyllic scenes of Los Angeles backyards and swimming pools. Above all else, Hockney wants us to like him. His subjects are leisure-time fun, modern relationships, and the buyables we all want to surround ourselves with. Slipping into his show is like opening the Times to the “Home” section—you’re avoiding the real stuff. His art, which is about life styles, aims for the same lowest common denominator that we encounter on the life-style pages of the newspapers. Hockney is an obvious right choice for a summer show, because so much of his work deals with vacation pleasures. But in New York in the summer,