THE art world can’t resist a good scrap and this month it’s David Hockney and Damien Hirst who have the critics gathering around them like kids flocking to a playground fight.

The artists are opening major exhibitions within a few days of each other – Hockney launches his Yorkshire landscapes show, A Bigger Picture, at the Royal Academy this weekend, while the Gagosian Gallery is displaying more than 300 of the Young British Artist’s spot paintings across its 11 locations worldwide.

Aside from their use of vivid colour and level of media attention, there’s not much to compare their output.

Hirst’s work ranges from a 1in x½in painting of half a spot to a huge piece featuring just four spots, each 5ft wide, in a show drawn from more than 150 different lenders from 20 countries.

Also included is his most recent spot painting containing 25,781 1mm-wide spots with no single color ever repeated.

Meanwhile, the elder artist’s retrospective covers a 50-year period, showing his fascination with landscape and includes some of his iPad drawings as well as a series of new films produced using 18 cameras.

However, there is another difference considered even more significant by the Bradford-born artist.

A single line on a poster for his Royal Academy show reads “All the works here were made by the artist himself, personally.”