Recordings and records of the conference
  

Art & Optics · NYU Conference, December 2001

Records of the Conference

The two-day symposium Art and Optics: Toward an Evaluation of David Hockney’s New Theories Regarding Opticality in Western Painting of the Past 600 Years, hosted by the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU on December 1–2, 2001, brought Hockney and Charles Falco together with their leading supporters and skeptics. The audio and video recordings are no longer available, and no bound proceedings volume was published — the speakers’ papers remain online in this exhibit. The book below is the primary published record of the thesis.

Note on conference materials. Audio and video recordings of the December 2001 sessions, formerly distributed by NYU, are no longer available for sale. The complete speaker papers and abstracts remain freely readable in the Art & Optics exhibit. For a single printed volume that captures Hockney’s argument as it stood at the time of the conference, see Secret Knowledge, below.

The Book of the Thesis

  • Secret Knowledge (first edition)

    Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters

    David Hockney · Viking Studio, 2001 (first edition)

    Published one month before the NYU conference, this is the book the symposium was convened to discuss. Hockney’s visual argument that painters from Van Eyck onward used lenses, mirrors and projections, illustrated with hundreds of plates. General readers.

    View on Amazon →
  • Secret Knowledge (New and Expanded Edition)

    Secret Knowledge (New and Expanded Edition)

    David Hockney · 2006

    The expanded paperback adds a chapter responding to the arguments raised at the NYU conference and in the years afterward, with additional plates and correspondence. The recommended edition for new readers.

    View on Amazon →

Closely Related Reading

  • Vermeer's Camera

    Vermeer’s Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces

    Philip Steadman · 2001 (paperback 2002)

    Published the same year as the conference. Steadman, a featured speaker, reconstructs Vermeer’s studio and shows that six paintings share the geometry of a single camera obscura setup. Scholarly but accessible.

    View on Amazon →
  • True to Life

    True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney

    Lawrence Weschler · 2008

    Weschler’s long-running New Yorker conversations with Hockney include the period leading up to and following the NYU symposium — the closest thing to a behind-the-scenes account of how the optics project came together. General readers.

    View on Amazon →
Amazon links use the WebExhibits Associates tag webexhibits; purchases support the exhibit. The Hockney cover image preserves the original exhibit asset at /hockneyoptics/i/HockneyBookCover.jpg; newer covers are served from /hockneyoptics/images/.
  
https://www.webexhibits.org/hockneyoptics/