The remarkable artistic development of David Hockney, culminating in the work on view in David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition, has been haunted by mortality, beginning with the AIDS crisis. Hockney's creative exuberance and untiring productivity, however, can be viewed as one sustained embrace of life in all its marvel in the face of all that desolation.

David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition, October 26, 2013—January 20, 2014. http://buzz.mw/bisnq_l

Lawrence Weschler is a veteran writer for The New Yorker, author of 15 books, notably Mr Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, Vermeer in Bosnia, and Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences, and his latest book Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative.