I don't know what Werner Herzog is up to these days, but if he's between projects, I humbly suggest that he make a documentary about Luna Luna, the Hamburg amusement park that took more than ten years to put together, included attractions designed by Dalí and Basquiat and Haring and Hockney, and spent thirty-five years in shipping containers. It's now been partly reassembled at the Shed, for the exhibition "Luna Luna, Forgotten Fantasy," through Jan. 5. The park's Fitzcarraldo, a poet-songwriter-pop star named André Heller, was born in Vienna in 1947 and spent much of his thirties persuading artists to decorate rides. Haring slathered a merry-go-round in melty cartoons; Basquiat dressed a Ferris wheel in his customary graffiti. The park opened to the public in 1987, largely funded by a gossip rag, and stayed that way for a summer.

For fans of digital art in a more traditional sense – art produced by a human who is making conscious decisions about their use of digital technologies – new trends dominating the genre have been met with some skepticism. Whereas the general public seems to have gotten on board with these shifts with little hesitation, the complexities of this new wave are not lost on those with familiarity to art, technology, or its intersection. While the emergence of these art forms dates back to the 20th century, the tail-end of the last decade has seen significant advancements in machine learning and increased visibility with easy promotion via social media. This past year, non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, caused frenzied bidding wars among its fans, and harsh criticisms from its skeptics, in part due to the environmental impact of the medium – on average, the creation of one Ethereum-based NFT, not including the computational power required in the sale process, amounts to 120.7 pounds of CO2, which is equivalent to driving a car 200 miles or 322 kilometers. However, regardless of reason, backlash from artists was minimal, with many looking to capitalize on the massive potential gains – with the exception of David Hockney, a digital artist himself and one of only two people on Earth whose work has sold for more than Beeple's $69.3 million-dollar NFT, The First 5000 Days. Hockney is responsible for the scalding take that NFTs are "silly little things" and that a better acronym would be "I.C.S. […] international crooks and swindlers."

David Hockney, one of the world's most famous living artists, is also a proponent of digital art. Hockney would argue significant technological advances occurred in the 15th Century with the arrival of optical devices. Centring around the mid 15th Century a radical transformation in the visual quality of painting happened. What we would call photorealistic today replaced the stylised rendering of the likes of Giotto. An understanding of optics and lenses gave artists a new way to capture the reality that the eye could see.

'I think it looks terrific," says David Hockney. The 83-year-old artist is taking a look around his new exhibition at the Royal Academy in London for the first time. He seems happy with it – and rightly so, for it is hypnotic and ravishing. But while I am getting a sneak preview in person, Hockney is here only virtually, his face appearing on two screens, one a giant TV, the other a small laptop. He is at home, at what he calls his "seven dwarves house" in Normandy, wearing a red, black and white check jacket, a checkerboard tie, a blue-green pullover and round, gold-framed glasses. His kaleidoscopic choice of clothing, challenging the very limits of the video call's bandwidth, is as vibrant and beguiling as the canvases hanging around us. Hockney has not just painted spring; he has come dressed as it. The artist has agreed to talk me through the exhibition, called The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020, and the arrangement underlines his idiosyncratic ease with technology. To make these iPad paintings, he and his team created a version of the Brushes app, working with a computer expert in Leeds to speed things up. "Drawing requires a certain speed," he says. "In Rembrandt's drawings, you can see how fast he drew." I can't handle Hockney on the big screen, so I sit in front of the laptop – after first taking in his art. He has filled some of the grandest rooms in the RA with pictures of blossoming branches, spilling flower beds, a rain-spattered pond and a tree house: simple subjects, faithfully depicted. I first saw many of these last spring, in my email inbox. Day after day, sometimes more than once a day, I would find a new Hockney, fresh from France, which was a great pick-me-up as the full scope of the pandemic began to dawn. The trouble was that I was soon running out of superlatives in my replies. He was "doing the arrival of spring in Normandy", as he puts it, and the work made headlines around the world when he released a few images to the media. Clearly, it was not just me who found Hockney's passionate pictures of new life in his cottage and garden in the Norman paysage uplifting. Here was movingly optimistic art, full of the promise of spring, even as Covid plunged the planet into despair. Now those pictures have been printed up to the scale of oil landscapes and are looking even better. This is Hockney's best exhibition in a long time, perhaps his most important ever, given the ode to joy it offers an injured world. It is also "a homage", he says, to the painters who first inspired him. Hockney was born in industrial Bradford in 1937 and grew up in a smoggy postwar Britain. Where did he get a feeling for all the bright strong colours that sweep this exhibition? "Well, it came from Monet and Matisse and Picasso.