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
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.
When you really respect somebody who does something different from you, your respect is for the quality of the job.
Art has political consequences, which is to say, it reorganizes society and creates constituencies of people around it.
...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.
I don't think the government should touch art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage risk-averse personalities to be artists.
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.
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 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.
I'm retiring because my time is up.
Art editors and critics - people like me - have become a courtier class.
If I go to London, everyone wants to talk about Damien Hirst. I'm just not interested in him. Never have been.
The idea of political content is irrelevant. Content is irrelevant. I always tell my students, "Never forget you're writing words! You know, word one, word two, word three, word four. The words have to be organized. Nothing else does."