"For our £120, we got 45 minutes of brightly coloured splats [David] Hockney has done on his iPad..."

"... blasted around the four walls while the old ham belted out his... platitudes in quadraphonic stereo all around us ('I love life,' 'the world is beautiful when you look, but most people don’t'). There were all the old banalities about the 'quality of the light' in Los Angeles, lots of film of him 'being inspired' while driving round the California mountains in a convertible while listening to Wagner (even duller than your best mate’s hourly Instagram posts from holiday) and then endless minutes of his opera sets, complete with cringey faux-naif animations that reminded me of when it said 'cartoon' in the TV schedule in the late 1970s and you switched on hoping for Tom and Jerry but got some depressing shadow puppet thing from 1950s Czechoslovakia.... [W]e were laughing so much we had to leave, through a shop in the foyer where they had attempted to find interesting things he has said over the years to put on their brightly coloured 'quote totes' (£20 a pop, if you please) but clearly couldn’t find anything better than 'If you’re not playful, you’re not alive,' 'I’m greedy for an exciting life,' and, from the militant old smoker, 'Health is wealth'...."

Writes Giles Coren in "Don’t splash out on Hockney’s splats and platitudes" (London Times).

The ellipsis before "platitudes" in that first sentence originally contained the phrase "sub-Alan Bennett," which was a stumbling block for me. Either I think, he's somebody known for belting out platitudes and move on, or I look up "Alan Bennett" in Wikipedia, which is what I did, and that got me nowhere... other than into the dead end of gazing at that 1973 photo and wondering who he looked like a combination of Robert Redford and.

Such are the hazards of reading comic columns in the London Times, which I actually subscribe to. But I removed the stumbling block for you, then felt a little bad to have interfered with Coren's rhythm and even fretted that some reader of mine might find "sub-Alan Bennett" especially funny. Let me know in the comments if you did. That's the kind of insight I seek, though I wouldn't pay £120 to have projections of it washed over me for 45 minutes.

The world is beautiful when you look, but most people don’t... but the show assumes we need a roomful of giant colors streaming at us from all directions. Good luck getting better at taking notice of the subtle beauty of the world after that. Or maybe you'll emerge as one of the cognoscenti, aware of the beauty of the world that is the notion that you are not in the disdained category, "most people."