It is the sort of thing Pop Artists say when they turn seventy. There is a kind of willed conservatism in David Hockney — Britain’s greatest living painter, born in 1937 — saying publicly that the current “fallow period” in British painting is because of the rise of the iPod, among other factors: “We are not in a very visual age... People plug in their ears and don’t look much.” Hockney is, of course, quite wrong here, and on every count. The world, especially the young world, is perhaps at its most visual now. And there has been a remarkable efflorescence of visual creativity as a result. It is true that more people can now be creative and famous than before with much less effort, and there is a great deal more of bad or mediocre art for that reason. (But one suspects that this has always been the case.) So, Hockney would have to wish away huge swathes of cinema, advertising, cyber-creativity, graphic novels, music videos and the whole universe of images that engulfs the contemporary eye during its waking and dreaming lives in order to play down the visuality of the modern age to this extent.

Second, why should listening to music while travelling necessarily bring about the end of looking? It might, in fact, be fascinating to wonder what Virginia Woolf would have felt if she were listening to a Schubert quintet while looking out of her omnibus window in the Twenties. After all, the human mind and senses are perfectly capable of aesthetic multi-tasking. At a purely ordinary level, human beings do use their senses all together most of the time, and often savour this simultaneity as a richlysensuous and creative experience. The memory, too, mixes up all sorts of sensations, and this muddle has not been a bad thing at all for Great, or even good, Art. Some of the most striking moments in cinema have been created out of the odd relationships between what one sees and what one hears. So, a plugged-in hoodie staring with apparent blankness out of a train window while travelling through bleakest suburbia could well be brewing something brilliantly postmodern in his empty-seeming head. Hockney trashed the iPod while opening an exhibition of Turner’s watercolours at the Tate, curated by Hockney himself. While this Romantic painter was producing his masterpieces in Britain, Beethoven was composing his symphonies in Germany. Possibly unknown to each other, they were together changing the way modern eyes and ears would look and listen.

Hockney should admit of the possibility that a young, iPodded Londoner might well drift into the Tate or the National Gallery and stop in front of a Turner with Beethoven playing in his little machine. That wouldn’t be a bad thing at all. And why should it be any less interesting if this young viewer were listening to Cold Play instead of Beethoven?