Soon after the book's publication in 1982, artist David Hockney read Lawrence Weschler's "Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist" Robert Irwin and invited Weschler to his studio to discuss it, initiating a series of engrossing dialogs, gathered here for the first time. Weschler chronicles Hockney's protean production and speculations, including his scenic designs for opera, his homemade xerographic prints, his exploration of physics in relation to Chinese landscape painting, his investigations into optical devices, his taking up of watercolor - and then his spectacular return to oil painting, around 2005, with a series of landscapes of the East Yorkshire countryside of his youth. These conversations provide an astonishing record of what has been Hockney's grand endeavor, nothing less than an exploration of 'the structure of seeing' itself.

勞倫斯·韋施勒是著名雜誌《紐約客》（New Yorker）的特派記者，同時也是紐約大學人文學院院長以及芝加哥人文藝術節的藝術主管。他的作品還有《威爾森先生神奇的櫃子》（Mr.Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder) (該作品曾入圍普利策新聞奬的最終評審），《維米爾在波斯尼亞》（Vermeer in Bosnia），以及《雜感集：往事曆曆》（Everything That Rises:A Book of Convergences）（本書獲得瞭2007年國際圖書批評傢協會最佳評論奬）。