Review by Pete Warzel
Somewhere near Santa Fe lives a man who in the 1990s set the art world spinning, with joy or disdain, depending upon which side of the working divide you were on.
The divide was in makers and doers in the democracy of art and beauty v. the arbiters of art, the tastemakers, the “therapeutic institution” that told you what was worth looking at or listening to or reading at night. Dave Hickey should have been on the institutional side of the division having entered the world of art criticism and academia. He was not. He had arrived via start-up art galleries and managing an established one in NYC (from which he resigned when asked to present an exhibition of Yoko Ono’s artwork), writing songs in Nashville, drugs, sex, rock and roll, and doing a stint as executive editor of Art in America magazine. Then Dave Hickey wrote The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty (1993), and his world and that of art criticism and the official determination of worthiness changed. For the better, I would think.
The dialogue had begun and Hickey was either a genius (he did receive a MacArthur “genius grant” in 2001) or the really bad boy in a room full of tweeds. He said in an interview in BOMB Magazine, April 1995, “…I am an art critic, which is the single unfundable, ungrantable, unendowable endeavor that is even vaguely connected with the arts. And justifiably so, in my case, since I am not with the program.”
You get the picture.
Enter Daniel Oppenheimer an excellent writer and admitted Hickey fanboy. He presents Hickey’s critical work as born in fear “… that legitimacy and legibility are the enemies of freedom and forgiveness. So he writes to protect the places where he found refuge from the people from and in whom he perceives judgment.” Maybe. But there is no argument that Hickey’s take no prisoners’ criticism changed the conversation, perhaps the status quo.
Dave Hickey was born in Fort Worth, Texas, 1940. His father was a dedicated, amateur jazz musician, taking Dave to impromptu gigs that opened up musical and artistic worlds for the boy. The family was mobile and Dave became a surfer, a writer, eventually a gallery owner in Austin before moving to NYC and entering an entirely different realm of art, exposure to the rock stars of painting, music and literature, and a life that was not afraid to take risks or fail. He had received a BA from Texas Christian University and an MA from the University of Texas and gave up on his doctoral dissertation before opening the Austin gallery named “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”, which is typical Dickey humor since his abandoned dissertation was about “the hidden syntactic patterns in Ernest Hemingway’s fiction.”
He was writing art and music criticism for the national magazines and during a panel discussion in the late 1980s launched the idea that he would explore in depth in The Invisible Dragon, and later in Air Guitar. The theme was a democratization of art and a return to “beauty”, not precisely defined, but “the beautiful…is a form of rhetoric….The more mastery an artist has of the rhetoric of the beautiful, the more effectively he can rewire how our brains process and perceive visual sense data. It is an awesome power.” The beauty in art – painting, music, writing, can bring people together over the object or art that they love. The institutions only propound virtue, making learned judgments in doing so, and are oblivious to the individualized, multi-faceted nature of the beautiful.
“Beauty” as democratized in The Invisible Dragon would secure him a tenured position in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where the city and its cultural nuances informed his written work going forward. Writing about his associates at UNLV he observed, “I suspect that my unhappy colleagues are appalled by the fact that Vegas presents them with a flat-line social hierarchy – that having ascended from ‘food” to ‘cocktail’ in Las Vegas, there is hardly anywhere else to go (except perhaps, up to ‘magician’)…because the rich are not special in Las Vegas, because money here is just money…. Membership at the University Club will not get you comped at Caesars, unless you play baccarat.” (from Air Guitar)
In 2010 he and his wife, Libby Lumpkin, curator, art historian, and newly appointed professor of art history at UNM, moved to Albuquerque and then Santa Fe. Hickey is now in poor health, eighty years old, mostly unable to travel. However, he did return to Las Vegas in 2017 to give several lectures at UNLV, and witnessed the massacre at the Mandalay Bay Hotel.
Although Oppenheimer does not quote Hickey about life in Santa Fe, he certainly gives hints, if we accept he has “learned” the critic well enough to speak for him, in a very Hickey-like tone – Santa Fe is “…a brief squiggle of kitsch along his Silk Road…. “ In an article written for Harvard Design Magazine in 2001 that I found, Hickey addresses his then adopted hometown, Las Vegas, Nevada, and his future place of exile, Santa Fe, New Mexico, as “dialectical utopias” because “…the cities do speak to one another – although neither one of them listens.” Hickey knows what we all know, but makes no qualms about airing his opinions, perhaps not knowing then, or more likely, not caring, that he would come to live here one day. But perhaps he had an inkling, as he also curated the acclaimed SITE Santa Fe biennial in 2001. In his curatorial statement for that exhibition, now twenty years ago, Hickey stated “I know how to look and I remember what I see.” What he saw in Santa Fe at the time (in the Harvard Design Magazine piece) was an “invented” community, a “choice”, a “dream within the dream.” That “…attempts to embody and evoke the eternal West.”
I think that kind of observation makes the dialogue, for us, interesting, even if we are not quite listening. The parallel universes of Las Vegas and Santa Fe could only be a Hickey construct. They are each visions of the American West, two very different embodiments of the “beautiful”, and so, individual statements about the country itself. I wonder what he thinks now, after living here for a good spell.
Daniel Oppenheimer has written a succinct gem of critical biography about a writer/critic who had the insight to take on the defects of his own chosen profession, empower artists, and speak truth when the world was seemingly ready to listen. Bravo to them both. Dave Hickey might be “far from respectable” as the title implies, but a brilliant voice to listen to, and take heed. This biography just might lead you back to read Hickey’s The Invisible Dragon, or Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy, to learn what the intellectual commotion was really all about.
Far From Respectable: The Art of David Hickey
University of Texas Press
Hardcover, 141pages
$24.95 (Order the book at top of this page page)
