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
When you really respect somebody who does something different from you, your respect is for the quality of the job.
...There are issues worth advancing in images worth admiring; and the truth is never "plain," nor appearances ever "sincere." To try to make them so is to neutralize the primary, gorgeous eccentricity of imagery in Western culture since the Reformation: the fact that it cannot be trusted, that imagery is always presumed to be proposing something contestable and controversial. This is the sheer, ebullient, slithering, dangerous fun of it. No image is presumed inviolable in our dance hall of visual politics, and all images are potentially powerful.
Even if one succeeds in making a silk purse out of a sow's ear, there remains the problem of what to do with a one-eared sow.
In images,... beauty was the agency that caused visual pleasure in the beholder; and any theory of images that was not grounded in the pleasure of the beholder begged the question of their efficacy and doomed itself to inconsequence.
I'm retiring because my time is up.
If I go to London, everyone wants to talk about Damien Hirst. I'm just not interested in him. Never have been.