#dave hickey

[jacobwren]

I want a “slow art” that flourishes in the problematic of its desirability.

Dave Hickey

[annanemones]

now that dave hickey is dead i really want to write about taking his classes in undergrad. my experience of him was so much less about his writing than his presence; a caustic, confrontational, indifferent teacher with better things to do and much better things already done.

[kakaji]

What if works of art were considered to be what they actually are-- frivolous objects or entities with no intrinsic value that only acquire value through a complex process of socialization during which some are empowered by an ongoing sequence of private, mercantile, journalistic, and institutional investments that are irrevocably extrinsic to them and any intention they might embody?

Dave Hickey, Frivolty and Unction, 1996

[thequoteaday]

Beauty is and always will be blue skies and open highway.

Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty

[privateagonies]

Today, of course, it is all an art market, the whole of American commerce. We can’t make a toaster anymore, a VCR, or even a decent faucet, but we can create desire. We can make fetching footwear, beautiful games, exquisite motorcycles, hot TV, great rock-and-roll records, and dazzling movies. Such artifacts constitute our principle contributions to global commerce. The alternative discourse of embodied dissent, however, has all but disappeared. Those customized and hopped-up objects and images we might expect, that demonstrate against the standards of the republic and advocate their own refined vision of power and loveliness, are nowhere to be seen — since power and loveliness themselves are presumed to be at issue — as if they might be talked away, along with the image, the object, and commerce itself, as evidence of human vanity, so that art might more closely approach the paper body of bureaucracy.

— Dave Hickey, "The Birth of the Big, Beautiful Art Market" from Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy

[privateagonies]

If we do this, then we can stop regarding the art world as a “world” or a “community” or a “market” and begin thinking of it as a semi-public, semi-mercantile, semi-institutional agora — an intermediate institution of civil society, like that of professional sports, within which issues of private desire and public virtue are negotiated and occasionally resolved. Because the art world is no more about art than the sports world is about sport. The sports world conducts an ongoing referendum on the manner in which we should cooperate and compete. The art world conducts an ongoing referendum on how things should look and the way we should look at things — or it would, if art were regarded as sports are, as a wasteful, privileged endeavor through which very serious issues are sorted out.

— Dave Hickey, "Frivolity and Unction" from Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy

[privateagonies]

So here’s my suggestion: At this moment, with public patronage receding like the spring tide anyway and democracy supposedly proliferating throughout the art world, why don’t all of us art-types summon up the moral courage to admit that what we do has no intrinsic value or virtue — that it has its moments and it has its functions, but otherwise, all things considered, in its ordinary state, unredeemed by courage and talent, it is a bad, silly, frivolous thing to do. We could do this, you know. And those moments and those functions would not be diminished in the least. Because the presumption of art’s essential “goodness” is nothing more than a political fiction that we employ to solicit taxpayers’ money for public art education, and for the public housing of works of art that we love so well their existence is inseparable from the texture of the world in which we live.

— Dave Hickey, "Frivolity and Unction" from Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy

[privateagonies]

Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else's privilege.

— Dave Hickey, "A Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz" from Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy