David Hockney rebuffs 'greatest living artist' title
David Hockney has rebuffed claims that he is Britain's greatest living artist, calling the description "newspaper stuff".
"It doesn't bother me, it doesn't mean too much to me, actually," said the 74-year-old, one of the best-known figures of the 1960s British pop art movement.
"I live in a remote place, I intend to stay in it, I'm not very social - I'm too deaf to be social."
The artist opens a major exhibition at London's Royal Academy on 21 January.
It features a series of paintings inspired by the East Yorkshire landscape, which he made after returning to the area from California in 2005.
"This show is my excitement at a period in my life when I'd gone to a place I thought was familiar and found it refreshing and very stimulating.
"If you're my age and you find something that's exciting you stick with it."
Many of the works are large-scale - some as big as a double decker bus - and they include watercolours, oil paintings, iPad art and video installations.
Hockney told the BBC he felt that landscapes had fallen out of favour in recent years.
Artists have "given up drawing," he said, because "they think the photograph does it all".
But he said he would continue to draw because "I am depicting the world, or the way you see it.
"I've often said, photography doesn't do it that well," he added.
Speaking to the BBC's Arts Editor Will Gompertz, he also bemoaned the dominance of film in modern art.
"There are things you can't film," he noted.
"The camera loves movement - smoke, fire, water.
"The consequence is you'll see more pictures of Rome burning and flooding than Rome being built because the camera likes it."
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