Dave Hickey
Dave Hickey
David Hickeyhas written for many American publications including Rolling Stone, Art News, Art in America, Artforum, Harper's Magazine, and Vanity Fair. Nicknamed "The Bad Boy Of Art Criticism” and “The Enfant Terrible Of Art Criticism”, he was formerly Professor of English at the University of Nevada Las Vegas and Distinguished Professor of Criticism for the MFA Program in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of New Mexico...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth5 December 1940
CountryUnited States of America
I hate all that woozy political and psychotherapeutic crap applied to books and art.
Art editors and critics - people like me - have become a courtier class.
I don't think the government should touch art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage risk-averse personalities to be artists.
I have no evangelical feelings about art at all. I despise art education. Art doesn't lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It's a set of propositions about how things should look.
Art and writing come from somewhere down around the lizard brain. It's a much more peculiar activity than we like to think it is. The problems arise when we try to domesticate the practice, to pretend that it's a normal human activity and that "everybody's creative." They're not.
Art has political consequences, which is to say, it reorganizes society and creates constituencies of people around it.
With the artists, I don't teach, I coach. I can't tell them how to make art. I tell them to make more art. I tell them to get up early and stay up late. I tell them not to quit. I tell them if somebody else is already making their work. My job is to be current with the discourse and not be an asshole. That's all I wanted in a professor.
Beautiful art sells. If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells anything else, it is a seductive advertisement.
Martha Stewart contributes more to our civility than the Baptist Church.
If I go to London, everyone wants to talk about Damien Hirst. I'm just not interested in him. Never have been.
As my friend Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe has argued persuasively, there is an element of positivity in the visible world, and in color particularly, that totally eludes the historicity of language, with its protocols of absence and polarity. The color red, as an attribute of the world, is always there. It is something other than the absence of yellow and blue--and, thus, when that red becomes less red, it becomes more one or the other. It never exists in a linguistic condition of degradation or excess that must necessarily derive from our expectations.
My mother was an economics professor. I'm proficient in math, and statistics, game theory, symbolic logic and all of that.
Where do you learn how to act? Not at church. America is a lot more like pagan Rome than we think. We still sacrifice to objects to gain our social goals.
I'm retiring because my time is up.