Amid competing efforts to cheer up Britain, the great pageants of the Olympics and the Queen's diamond jubilee might just have to make way for a new, unlikely contender in the race to restore our elusive feelgood factor.
On Saturday the doors to the much-publicised David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts opened to the public and, from the reaction of those the Observer spoke to, it could prove to be the most successful yet in a run of gallery blockbusters of work by artists that have included Paul Gaugin and Leonardo da Vinci. With advance tickets sold out until March, the exhibition could beat the Royal Academy's previous record-breaker, last year's The Real Van Gogh.
"Its strength is its sheer exuberance, the richness and the colours, on a rather dreary January day it makes you feel so optimistic," said Jim Bruce, an artist from London, emerging from the glass exit doors of the Hockney rooms. "It is the first glimmer of hope I have had this year when everything is so bleak. It lifts one's spirits. He has taken landscape to a whole new level, because it's abstract yet you could go to these places he is painting and recognise them."
His wife, who did not want to be named, agreed. "It makes you feel so happy. Really lifts the spirits. The video camera installation, with the clarity of the colours and the contrast between the scenes of winter and summer, is just delicious. There is a real stunned silence in that room, people are overawed."
Hong Kong students Amber Thavasa and Tan Cheng, both 22, adored the giant prints of Hockney's drawings on an iPad.
"I don't know how he could do that and I have tried," said Cheng. "It is very wonderful, very happy and not what we expected to find in English art galleries. It is not a great big intellectual effort, just beautiful and joyful."
The pair deliberate over what postcards of the works they want to buy, and take great handfuls to the busy tills. The gallery's shop is packed out with customers and assistants rushing out piles of fresh stock to replace the fast depleting piles of Hockney books and posters. Shelley Thompson, 45, from Ealing, London, is clutching a Hockney-inspired painting-by-numbers set for her 12-year-old son Keelan. "It's great, you never see these any more and he's keen to get painting after seeing all those colours in there!"
