«I BELIEVE MEDIA IS ART»

MARK COLVIN: So does the digital age make us all like that to a degree? Are we all now forced to be very public in that way?

STEPHEN FRY: Well, yes and no. It's not, you know, I hear the wings of Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame fluttering above us and I'm not sure that it does really mean that. Of course it gives everybody access. It gives everybody a printing press. But then people have had, you know, stencils and roneos and ways of reproducing ideas and if they wanted to go out and push them through everybody's letterbox they always could have done. But how you get read and noticed on the Internet is still a mystery. And in the end technology's always about talent. I'm very lucky in the time, a friend - or certainly a sort of affectionate acquaintance - of the English painter, David Hockney and David over the last three or four months has become unbelievably excited about the iPad and he paints every day using his fingers on the screen of an iPad. And he sends to some of his friends the works that he does. And so most days I get a David Hockney in my inbox. And they are stunningly beautiful. I'll show them to you if you like on my phone. I've got, I carry them with me because they are so lovely. Now the fact is the technology that produces - it's a piece of software called Brushes that you can run on your iPad - and it allows you, you know, to have this immense feel of oils or water colours and extraordinary precision that you can paint and draw with your fingers and colour. It's just marvellous what you can do. But you do have to be David Hockney. It's not good me having that any more than it's any good me having a sound studio with midi channels and keyboards and every voice and sound and software patch for every instrument in the world. It would be hopeless because I just don't have the talent to use it.

ABC NEWS