To accompany the mass culling of kebab stalls in the name of pre-Olympic East End sanitisation, Ruth MacKenzie and a batallion of artists, dancers, actors, musicians, directors, curators and writers have been deployed by the Olympic committee to come up with something for sports-goers to do when they’re not in the arena. Now that standing around a kebab stall is no longer a feasible pastime, they have come up with an alternative solution: a London 2012 Festival of the arts – the culmination of the Cultural Olympiad begun in 2008. 

The festival, which begins in June, includes events that are already open, among them the Royal Academy’s exhibit David Hockney: A Bigger Picture. The show, which opened back in January, received huge critical acclaim for its bravery in ditching the nostalgic retrospective for a display of new work, including Hockney’s ipad drawings and short films. In fact, he made many of the works only after the Royal Academy asked him to do the show, keeping the huge walls of the gallery in mind. When the Royal Academy first approached him, most of what is now in the show did not yet exist. ‘They were taking a chance on would I produce something good,’ said Hockney. ‘And I was taking a chance on could I. I believed I could.’ 

It is this confidence that asserts itself in each of Hockney’s pictures and constitutes his unique style. The lurid pinks that ignore the green and blue and yellow they sit next to, scream of the sure touch of an artist who has a cohesive vision of the world and can reproduce it en masse on demand. The pictures are ice cream for the eyes – lemon, strawberry, bubble-gum, each flavour a thrilling version of the cold sweetness that feels just so good in spring. 

Which is not a criticism. It is wonderful to be able to unabashedly ‘ooh!’ and ‘ah!’ at an artist’s perfect purple – or to eavesdrop on others’ oohs and ahs as they find that there’s a canvas in the fifth room which is even bigger than the canvas in the fourth room. And there is some critical weight to Hockney’s work. His films, for example, shown on eighteen screens whose perspective and time scale are out of sync, are a brilliant emulation of the irregularity of our vision.

But you need hardly think of this when walking through King George III’s old institution, thinking about the Constables that have littered its walls. Hockney is a part of an older artistic tradition that celebrates the English landscape without any apology for its conceptual simplicity. To search for interest would be to impose your ego on his work and to ignore the fact (wonderful in itself) that this artist can just churn out beauty after beauty. Go to the Hockney and then, before your mind starts working, go to another event in the London 2012 Festival.