About two weeks ago, Edward Hopper’s art started enjoying an expected revival, not in a museum but on Twitter. “We are all edward hopper paintings now,” declared Michael Tisserand, a New Orleans, based writer who, in a viral tweet that has since racked up hundreds of thousands of likes, assembled four images of Hopper works featuring lonesome-looking souls in bare indoor settings.

 

The sentiment struck a chord, with the prominent art critic Jonathan Jones even penning a full-length essay on it for the Guardian. So moved was he by the notion of Hopper’s paintings now that Jones wrote, “We choose modern loneliness because we want to be free.”

 

But therein lies a difference between Hopper’s forlorn subjects and so many of us right now. They choose to live in modernity and find themselves alienated because of it. We choose to simply try to stay alive in the world today and a pandemic that has so far killed more than 36,000 worldwide is keeping us captive. We are not all Edward Hopper paintings now.