Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art 9781477323151

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UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS 

 AUSTIN

The publication of this book was made possible in part by the Mattsson McHale Foundation, the Stillwater Foundation, Frannie Dittmer, Jeanne and Michael Klein, and Jean and Dan Rather. Copyright © 2021 by Daniel Oppenheimer All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2021 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form

Frontispiece: Ian Jehle, Canadian (Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 1970–), The Theorist (Dave Hickey), 2004–2007, graphite and casein on paper, 96 × 80 in.

The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Oppenheimer, Daniel, author. Title: Far from respectable : Dave Hickey and his art / Daniel Oppenheimer. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2020043901 (print) | LCCN 2020043902 (ebook) ISBN 978-1-4773-2015-0 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4773-2315-1 (library ebook) ISBN 978-1-4773-2316-8 (non-library ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Hickey, Dave, 1940– | Art critics—United States—Biography. Classification: LCC N7483.H53 O67 2021 (print) | LCC N7483.H53 (ebook) | DDC 709.2 a B—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043901 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043902 Book design by Lindsay Starr. doi:10.7560/320150

FOR MY PARENTS, JOANNE AND TIM OPPENHEIMER

In fact, we cannot recognize an insult (as opposed to an attempt to insult) unless it is to some extent successful and makes a minimum amount of sense. How deep it will be depends completely on the extent and the importance of what it puts down, and it is impossible, as we have seen, to put something down without envisaging a better alternative, which is, then, part of its point and accomplishment. The two go hand in hand, and what we call them reflects whose side we are taking. Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art

In the places where I was comfortable, whether honky-tonk, bohemian ghetto or fraternity house, there was just one rule: if you want to paint yourself blue and walk on your hands go ahead, just don’t suggest, don’t even imply that anyone else should too. Even today, any congenial grouping of art and morality makes me break out in eczema. Dave Hickey, “The Texas to New York via Nashville SemiTranscontinental Epiphany Tactic,” Art in America

Introduction: His Blue Eden  →  1 Far from Respectable, Even Now  →  11 The Semi-Transcontinental Epiphany Tactic  →  35 The Value of Beauty Remains Unjustified  →  63 His Simple Heart  →  89 Acknowledgments  →  121 Notes  →  124 Illustration Credits   →  135 Index  →  139

My own Eden would include paintings by Ellsworth Kelly, a white beach, and serious waves. There would be a beachside restaurant with space between the tables and a casino with Palladian doors open to the breeze. There would also be palm trees in the fog. Dave Hickey, “Wonderful Shoes,” The Perfect Wave

For a number of years in the late 2000s and early 2010s, Dave Hickey’s byline in magazines said that he was working on a book called Pagan America. There’s even a ghostly record of the title on Google Books, with a precise page count and ISBN, as though the manuscript were finished, paginated, and catalogued, but then withdrawn and locked away in the writer’s desk, left to be published, if ever, posthumously.1 For those of us who were Hickey fans during those years of uncertainty, it was a shimmering promise. After the cold brilliance of his first book, The Invisible Dragon, and the warm love song of his next, Air Guitar, he was going to bring it all together into one grand synthesis, a story of America that would elevate us and explain us to ourselves.

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It never materialized. As Hickey had written of himself, many years before, he wasn’t a big book kind of guy; “he was too much of a musician to write anything that took more than one sitting to read. He was a sprinter (a hurdler, really) and what mattered to him most in writing . . . had always been the mental music of language rushing by, from start to finish, as a single occasion.”2 He didn’t have the endurance to finish. He also no longer quite wanted to finish. When he had first promised the book to his publisher, in the early years of the new century, it was in the form of an argument. By 2015, when the mention of Pagan America quietly disappeared from his byline, he no longer believed it. The argument was this: America at its most distinctive wasn’t JudeoChristian or capitalist or even democratic in a simple way. It was pagan. Not an earth spirit paganism of the moors and glens, but a polytheistic, commercial, cosmopolitan paganism of the bazaar and the agora. We invested objects, people, and performances with the power of our dreams and fears, and then we organized ourselves around those idols in “non-exclusive communities of desire,”3 arguing about them, buying and selling pieces and images of them on the open market, trying to woo others into our camp and score points over rival camps. We were a democratic people, but to see American democracy clearly was to understand that unlike, say, British or South Korean democracy, our democracy renewed itself on a substratum of pagan devotions to movie stars, rock stars, oil paintings, charismatic political figures, football teams, ingenues, mystery novels, muscle cars, runway shows, action movies, and action painters. “As Americans,” he wrote, “we are citizens of a large, secular, commercial democracy; we are relentlessly borne forth on the flux of historical change, routinely flung laterally by the exigencies of dreams and commerce. We are bereft of the internalized commonalities of race, culture, language, region, and religion that traditionally define ‘peoples.’ As

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such, we are social creatures charged with inventing the conditions of our own sociability out of the fragile resource of our private pleasures and secret desires. So, lacking the terms for communication, we correlate. We gather around icons from the worlds of fashion, sports, the arts, and entertainment as we would about a hearth. We trace infinite lines of transit around these strange attractors.”4 The devotional icons for Hickey, the furniture of his blue eden, were people and things like Siegfried and Roy in Vegas, Waylon Jennings in Nashville, Chet Baker by the beach, Perry Mason on the UHF dial, Richard Pryor on the Sunset Strip, Leo Castelli on the Upper West Side, Bridget Riley in undulating waves of color or black and white, Gustave Flaubert on the page, Robert Mitchum on the screen, Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos on a coke dealer’s coffee table on Hudson Street, Susan Sontag holding court at the St. Regis Hotel, and Dr. J rising up and under and around to complete the greatest lay-up in basketball history. These were his personal fetish objects, but more important to understand was that we were all free to design and furnish our own edens and free to say thanks but no thanks to those representatives of government and official culture who would tell us what to consume for our own good, as though art were broccoli rather than gnocchi. It wasn’t necessarily the best of all possible worlds, this anxious huddling around idols, pouring into and drawing from them energy, hoping to stay warm in the cold. Given our specific inheritance, however, it was for Hickey the best we had been able to do so far and preferable to the alternatives. It held us together, when so much else didn’t, because it educated us in how to passionately hold distinctive values without desiring to purge conflicting ones. It both sublimated and civilized politics. “In such societies [as ours],” he wrote, “the discourse of art is the civil site upon which we freely expand and refine our language of perceived value—because for all the anxiety, disorientation, and putative violence

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Intake. 1964. Bridget Riley. Acrylic on canvas. 701/4 × 701/4 in.

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that our transactions with works of art entail, nobody gets killed as a consequence of them anymore. Very few even go to jail, and that is just the point: art is a safe place where we may nonviolently come to terms with disorienting and dangerous situations and adjudicate their private relevance in a public discourse.”5 Our pagan proclivities, for Hickey, were also an explanation for why American culture seemed to travel so well. In our urgency to knit ourselves together, and our selves together, we made art, music, movies, clothes, cars, advertisements, and jokes that cut unusually close to the universal force lines of desire and pleasure. It gave our culture a potency that was palpable even in societies that had more unitary and anchored traditions. In the early years of the new century, in a fit of uncharacteristic optimism, this was what Hickey believed. We were a pagan society in which art and other autonomous domains of value-signifying and embodying culture were steadily winning the war over the authoritarian coercions of the church, the therapeutic bromides of the schools and museums, and the interpretive rigidities of the Academy. Then, for good reason, Hickey stopped believing it was so. At stake in this book are two questions. One has to do with the value and legacy of Dave Hickey’s writing. Among all the art that is produced every decade or century, is his art exceptional? Is it worth our time? The second question is whether he’s saying something of particular importance to the common life we lead together. Is he particularly relevant right now? The first question is easier to answer. He has written two books that are classics of twentieth-century American criticism, two more that are excellent, and assorted other essays that glow with distinction. There is no one like him; he belongs in the canon of American nonfiction prose.

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This book doesn’t make this case directly. Instead, it tries to seduce readers into a direct engagement with his writing and trusts that whatever follows from that encounter will seal the deal. The second question is harder to answer. It requires both a diagnosis of a problem in our common life and an argument for why Hickey’s writing isn’t just wonderful but also meliorative or bracing in the context of this problem. The book doesn’t make this diagnosis or case directly either. Instead, it takes for granted that there’s been a gradual attenuation in the imaginative life of this country since the 1960s that is detrimental both to the creation of art and to our shared democratic project. The realm of possibility has contracted. Fault for this lies with many actors, some of whom Hickey has pinioned beautifully and brutally, others of whom he’s ignored or even apologized for. Hickey’s relevance, in this context, follows not from the success but from the failure of Pagan America. He was wrong that “ethical, cosmopolitan paganism” was ascendant. Across the board it is in retreat, not just from ethno-nationalists who would bend culture to the needs of the state and the Volk but also from puritanical intellectuals and activists who would regulate culture in the name of justice, equity, and identity. The other guys are winning. The pagans are losing. Hickey was not wrong, however, that cosmopolitan lives of the sort he described are worth cultivating and that a society in which such currents ran strong would be glorious, or at least rather fabulous. One can imagine a parallel universe version of the book that puts forth Pagan America not as an argument but as a vision of what we could be. We didn’t get that book, but it is just such a vision of who we could be, which is simply more of who we are at our most interesting and dynamic, that animates Hickey’s best writing. He is an essayist not just Facing 

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CL+JG 2099. 2019.

James Gobel. 72 × 60 in. Hand-cut felt, flashe, acrylic, embroidery thread, PVA on canvas.

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of the jam session and the atelier, but also of the circles of community and conversation that emanate from those sites of primary artistic creation, of the painter and the critic, the novelist and the reader, the pop star and the fan, and the big-wave surfer and the Idahoan teen who knows that his Sex Wax t-shirt says something urgent about who he is. Hickey is a cartographer as well of many of the psychological and sociological traps and cul-de-sacs that can get in the way of creating or participating in such communities and conversations. And he is a grantor of permission and forgiveness, a purveyor of caring, knowing acceptance, and encouragement. This last bit is perhaps the least remarked upon but most intensely felt of Hickey’s effects as a writer. As readers, we know when we are being judged, and for all the pungency of his opinions, Hickey isn’t judging. He is three-fourths a disaster himself, and he knows better than most that we are all struggling, self-sabotaging creatures. Embedded in his work is a conviction that the joyful and passionate instantiations of our selves that sometimes emerge in the presence of art and culture are too precious to casually or presumptively reject. One could even say there is a Christian quality in Hickey’s writing, though it’s a Christianity of the early years, before Jesus signed with a major label, when the faith was a haven from the sternness of the Pharisees rather than an inheritor of their paternalistic moralism. His is a sinners’ church. In a late essay, Hickey reflects on the decades of his life spent among the “casually damned . . . [the] rock and rollers, artists, poets, strippers, and hookers.” Living, partying, and playing with those who had been cast out, abandoned, or ignored by respectable society, he found a sense of camaraderie and a blessed lack of judgment. “Nobody goes on about where they come from, and nobody asks. Nobody asks you where you went to school, because you probably didn’t. Everybody knows, as Kris

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Kristofferson observed, that it takes more brains to get out of Kentucky than it does to get out of Connecticut, and that’s a comfort.”6 Part of the urgency of Hickey’s writing comes from a perception that even these realms of the damned are being colonized by the virtue-promoting institutions from which they had long provided refuge. He fears, perhaps too much, that legitimacy and legibility are the enemies of freedom and forgiveness. So he writes to protect the places where he had found refuge from the people from and in whom he perceives judgment. He has failed in the larger endeavor. The colonization continues. In the process of failing as a political actor, however, he has generated as an artist a new payload of freedom and solace for others, and he has extended his offer of citizenship outward even to those of us who are not the casually damned, to the pirates and to the farmers. In the land of Hickey, all are welcome, all are forgiven, and your eden is yours to furnish, as long as you extend the same generosity to your neighbor.

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On June 12, 1989, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, announced that it was cancelling Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, its scheduled exhibition of photographs by the celebrated American photographer, who had died of AIDS in March. The Corcoran’s primary motive in cancelling was fear. Only a few months before, a long-simmering debate about the role of the federal government in funding the arts had boiled over in response to Piss Christ, a photograph of a small icon of Jesus on the cross floating in a vitrine of urine. Its creator, Andres Serrano, had received a small chunk of a larger grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and the offending photograph had been included in a touring exhibition that was also funded by federal money. During that tour, the

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photograph caught the eye of the American Family Association, a conservative Christian advocacy group dedicated to fighting what it saw as anti-Christian values in entertainment and the arts. They rang the alarm. Soon after, New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato called out Piss Christ from the floor of the Senate. He tore up a reproduction of the photo and denounced it as a “deplorable, despicable display of vulgarity.” North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, who would soon lead the charge against Mapplethorpe, added: “I do not know Mr. Andres Serrano, and I hope I never meet him. Because he is not an artist, he is a jerk. . . . Let him be a jerk on his own time and with his own resources. Do not dishonor our Lord.”1 Patrick Trueman, president of the American Family Association, testified to Congress that governmental support of work like Piss Christ would make it less likely that prosecutors would pursue or win cases against child pornographers.2 The ensuing congressional battle, over funding for the NEA, became the first in a series of broader cultural and political battles that would come to be known, in retrospect, as the “culture wars” of the 1990s. These battles would range not just over sex and politics in the arts, but also over issues like gays in the military, federal funding for abortion, and control over history and social studies curricula in the public schools. It was “a war for the soul of America,” as Pat Buchanan framed it at the 1992 Republican Party convention, a contest over whether the nation would continue to secularize and liberalize or would return to a more conservative social equilibrium. The full contours of the conflict weren’t immediately evident in the aftermath of the Serrano affair, but it was very clear, right away, that the Mapplethorpe exhibit was another grenade ready to go off. Its organizers at the University of Pennsylvania had received NEA money, and the Corcoran Gallery, walking distance from the White House, was too visible an institution to slide by the notice of people like Helms and

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D’Amato. So the Corcoran canceled the exhibition, hoping to shield themselves from the shrapnel and avoid giving conservatives another opportunity to question the value of federal funding for the arts.3 Instead, they got fragged by all sides. By fellow curators and museum administrators, who believed the Corcoran’s appeasement would only encourage more aggression from haters of contemporary art. By civil libertarians, who saw the Corcoran’s actions as an example of how expressive speech was being chilled by the culture war rhetoric of the right. By a major donor, a friend of Mapplethorpe, who angrily withdrew a promised bequest to the museum of millions of dollars. And, of course, by the conservatives they had been hoping to appease, who accurately recognized the blasphemy in Mapplethorpe’s federally funded portraits of sodomites doing naughty things to each other and themselves. Piss Christ had been useful to the conservative cultural cause as an example of how homosexual artists were taking taxpayer money to spit on the values that decent Americans held dear, but it wasn’t ideal. How blasphemed could a good Christian really feel, after all, by an image of Jesus as reverential as what Serrano had in fact made? His Christ was bathed in glowing red-orange-yellow light, the image scored by dots and lines of tiny bubbles that come off almost like traces of exhumation, as if the whole thing has been recently, lovingly removed from the reliquary in which it’s been preserved for thousands of years. “I think if the Vatican is smart,” Serrano later said, “someday they’ll collect my work. I am not a heretic. I like to believe that rather than destroy icons, I make new ones.”4 Mapplethorpe’s pictures, though, were something else entirely, a real cannon blast against the battlements of heterosexual normativity. Where Serrano was mostly using new means to say some very old things about the mystery of the incarnation and the corporeality of Christ, Mapplethorpe was using orthodox pictorial techniques to bring to light

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a world of pleasure, pain, male-male sex, bondage, power, trust, desire, control, violation, submission, love, and self-love that had been banished to the dark alleyways, boudoirs, bathhouses, and rest stops of the West since the decline of Athens. And he was doing so masterfully, in the language of fine art, in the high houses of American culture. There was Lou, for instance, which could have been a photograph of a detail from an ancient bronze of Poseidon except that the detail in question is of Poseidon’s muscled arm holding his cock firmly in one hand while the pinky finger of his other hand probes its hole.5 In Helmut and Brooks, a fist disappearing up an anus plays like an academic exercise in shape and shadow. And in the now iconic Self-Portrait, Mapplethorpe has the handle of a bullwhip up his own rectum, his balls dangling in shadow beneath, his legs sheathed in leather chaps, his eyes staring back over his shoulder at the camera with a gaze so full of intelligence and vitality that it almost steals the show from the bullwhip. In response to these kinds of beautiful provocations, the outrage, which had been largely performative vis-à-vis Serrano, became rather genuine, and the whole thing escalated. By July, a month after the exhibition at the Corcoran had been cancelled, Congress was debating whether to eliminate entirely the $171 million budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. By October, a compromise was reached. The NEA and its sister fund, the National Endowment for the Humanities, would get their usual rounds of funding, minus a symbolic $45,000 for the cost of the Serrano and Mapplethorpe grants. They would be prohibited, however, from using the monies to support work that was too gay, too creepy in depicting children, or just too kinky. Exceptions were made for art that violated these taboos but had “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”6 But the point had been made, and the enforcement mechanism, in any case, wasn’t really the articulated rules. It was the threat of more haymaking from the right and, ultimately, the

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implied promise that if NEA-supported institutions kept sticking their noses (or fists) where they didn’t belong, then it wouldn’t be too long before there wouldn’t be any NEA left. A few months later, in April 1990, the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, took up the Mapplethorpe baton by opening their own exhibition of The Perfect Moment. Hoping to head off trouble, they segregated the most scandalous of the photos in a side room, with appropriate signage to warn off the young and the delicate. They also filed a motion in county court asking that the photographs be preemptively designated as not obscene. But the motion was denied, and the separate room proved insufficient buffer. When the exhibit opened to the public, on April 7, its attendees included members of a grand jury that had been impaneled by Hamilton County prosecutors to indict the museum and its director for violating Ohio obscenity law. Of the more than 150 images in the exhibit, seven were selected out by the grand jury for being obscene. Five depicted men engaged in homoerotic and/ or sado-masochistic acts, and two were of naked children. The trial that followed was symbolically thick. Motions were filed that forced the judge to rule on fundamental questions about the meaning and political status of art. Art critics and curators were called in to witness, before the largely working-class members of the jury, to the artistic merit of Mapplethorpe’s photography. The indictment read like an update of the Scopes trial, captioned by Larry Flynt, in which “the peace and dignity of the State of Ohio” was being ravaged by bands of cavorting homosexuals.7 The jury issued its verdict in October 1990, acquitting the museum and its director. It was a victory for the forces of high art and free expression, but a complicated one. The exhibition could go on. And Mapplethorpe’s photographs—indeed, the most outrageous of them— had been designated as art by the State of Ohio and by a group of decent,

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Polaroid of Robert Mapplethorpe. 1983. Andy Warhol.

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For Dave Hickey, a critic and ex-gallery owner, it was, finally, all too much. Not the opportunism of the Hamilton County sheriff and his allies. Not the predictable huffing from the bow-tied brigades, who took to the pages of their tweedy magazines to bellyache, as always, about what a precipitous decline there had been in cultural standards since the 1960s ruined everything. Not even the rednecking of the senator from North Carolina was the problem for Hickey.8 Each of these parties was performing its assigned role in the passion play of American cultural politics. Narrow-minded prosecutors would always try to run dirty pictures out of town. New Criterionites would avert their eyes from new art. Senators from North Carolina would demagogue about queers from New York City. You could be angry at having to contend with these actors, but you couldn’t genuinely feel betrayed. You knew where they stood from the get-go, and half the joy of art, and of the artistic life, lay in trying to figure out how to shock, outwit, or seduce them.

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law-abiding, presumably-not-gay-sex-having American citizens. But the cost had been high. Museums and galleries everywhere had been warned, and not all of them would be as willing as the Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati to risk indictment and the threat of defunding for the sake of showing dangerous art. Perhaps most significantly, the National Endowment for the Arts, and its new director, announced a shift in funding priorities in order to take the institution out of the crossfire of the culture wars. Less and less of their money, it was decided, would go to individual artists and exhibitions, and more of it would go to support arts enrichment—to schools, outreach programs, arts camps, and educational campaigns. Mapplethorpe and Serrano were out. Sesame Street was in.

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The betrayal, for Hickey, came from his colleagues, from the critics, curators, gallerists, professors, and arts administrators with whom he had been uneasily mixing since the late 1960s when he dropped out of his doctoral program in linguistics to open an art gallery in Austin, Texas. They had been handed a rare opportunity to represent for all that was queer and decadent and artsy-fartsy in American life, to make the case that this—beautiful pictures of men seeing what it felt like to shove things up their asses—wasn’t the worst of America but the best of it. And they had whiffed. “The American art community, at the apogee of its power and privilege, chose to play the ravaged virgin,” wrote Hickey, “to fling itself prostrate across the front pages of America and fairly dare the fascist heel to crush its outraged innocence. . . . [H]ardly anyone considered for a moment what an incredible rhetorical triumph the entire affair signified. A single artist with a single group of images had somehow managed to overcome the aura of moral isolation, gentrification, and mystification that surrounds the practice of contemporary art in this nation and directly threaten those in actual power with the celebration of marginality. It was a fine moment, I thought . . . and, in this area, I think, you have to credit Senator Jesse Helms, who, in his antediluvian innocence, at least saw what was there, understood what Robert was proposing, and took it, correctly, as a direct challenge to everything he believed in.”9 The Corcoran had been bad enough, throwing in the towel before an opponent had even stepped into the ring. But far worse, for Hickey, were the ones who had shown up to fight but had misread the aestheticalpolitical map so badly that they had gone to the wrong arena. The fight, he believed, should have been over whether it was okay or not in our culture to make beautiful the behaviors that Mapplethorpe had made beautiful. The fight should have been over what Mapplethorpe had done with his art. Instead, the public got bromides about free expression

Dave Hickey at the opening of the new building of the Art Museum of South Texas, October 1972. Rodney Marionneaux.

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and puritanical lectures about the civilizing function of arts in society. Worst of all, in Hickey’s eyes, was how quickly the art experts ran away from the rawness of Mapplethorpe’s work, characterizing him as though he were a philosopher of aesthetics, rather than an artist, as though he chose and framed his subjects for the sake of what they allowed him to say, propositionally, about the nature of light and beauty and other such things. “Mapplethorpe uses the medium of photography to translate flowers, stamens, stares, limbs, as well as erect sexual organs, into objet d’art,” wrote curator Janet Kardon in her catalogue essay for the exhibition. “Dramatic lighting and precise composition democratically pulverize their diversities and convert them into homogeneous statements.”10 When it came to it on the witness stand in Cincinnati, even the folks who had curated the exhibition, who surely knew that Mapplethorpe would bring the people in precisely because he was so titillating—Look at the dicks! Hey, even the flowers look like dicks!—couldn’t allow themselves even a flicker of a leer. So Hickey called them out. In a series of four essays written between 1989 and 1993, which were assembled into the sixty-four-page volume The Invisible Dragon, he launched a lacerating critique of American art critical and art historical practice. It was so unexpected, and so potent, that by the time he was done, his own intervention—a slim, impossibly cool, small-batch edition from Art issues Press—would be as transformative in the art critical realm as Mapplethorpe’s photographs had been in the photographic. The Invisible Dragon began with a story. It wasn’t necessarily a true story, but it was a good one. So good, in fact, that it has conditioned and, in significant ways, distorted perceptions of Hickey ever since. “I was drifting, daydreaming really,” wrote Hickey, “through the waning moments of a panel discussion on the subject of ‘What’s Happening

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Now,’ drawing cartoon daggers on a yellow pad and vaguely formulating strategies for avoiding punch and cookies, when I realized I was being addressed from the audience. A lanky graduate student had risen to his feet and was soliciting my opinion as to what ‘The Issue of the Nineties’ would be. Snatched from my reverie, I said, ‘Beauty,’ and then, more firmly, ‘The issue of the nineties will be beauty’—a total improvisatory goof—an off-the-wall, jump-start, free association that rose unbidden to my lips from God knows where. Or perhaps I was being ironic; wishing it so but not believing it likely? I don’t know, but the total, uncomprehending silence that greeted this modest proposal lent it immediate credence for me.”11 Hickey, an experienced provocateur, had been expecting some kind of pushback. (Beauty?! That old thing? The issue of the ’90s? You gotta be kidding me.) When he got none, he was intrigued. His fellow panelists hadn’t jumped in to tussle. The moderator didn’t seem ruffled. No one from the audience harangued him after he stepped down from the dais. Rather than setting off sparks, he had soft-shoed into a vacuum, which meant he had misjudged something, and in that misjudgment, he sensed, there lay potential. (“I was overcome by this strange Holmesian elation. The game was afoot.”12) He began interrogating friends and colleagues, students and faculty, critics and curators for their thoughts on beauty and its role in the production, assessment, and consumption of art. What he got back, again and again, was a simple and rather befuddling response: When asked about beauty, everyone talked about money. “Beauty” was the surface glitz that sold pictures in the bourgeois art market to people who lacked an appreciation for the deeper qualities of good art. It was a branding scheme of capitalism and the province of schmoozy art dealers, rich people, and high-end corporate lobby decorators. Artists themselves, and critics and scholars, were more properly concerned with other qualities: truth, meaning, discourse, language,

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ideology, form, justice. There were high-brow versions of this argument in journals like Art Forum and October, and there were less sophisticated versions, but the angle of incidence was the same. Hickey was stunned. Not by the content of such an argument— he knew his Marx and was familiar with left cultural criticism more broadly—but by the completeness of its triumph. He hadn’t realized the extent, almost total, to which beauty had been vanquished from the sphere of discursive concern. “I had assumed,” he wrote, “that from the beginning of the sixteenth century until just last week artists had been persistently and effectively employing the rough vernacular of pleasure and beauty to interrogate our totalizing concepts ‘the good’ and ‘the beautiful’; and now this was over? Evidently. At any rate, its critical vocabulary seemed to have evaporated overnight, and I found myself muttering detective questions like: Who wins? Who loses?”13 The quest to reconstruct what had happened to beauty soon evolved for Hickey into a more fundamental effort to understand what even he meant by the term. What was he defending? What was he trying to rescue or redeem? The critical vocabulary and community he had assumed were there, perhaps fighting a rearguard battle but still on the field, had winked out of existence without even a good-bye note. It was left to him, in the absence of anyone else, to reconstitute its concepts and arguments, restock its supply chain and armament. So he did, and he called it The Invisible Dragon. The issue, he wrote, is not beauty but the beautiful. The beautiful is the visual language through which art excites interest and pleasure and attention in an observer. It is a form of rhetoric, a quiver of rhetorical maneuvers. Artists ensorcell us through their beautiful assemblages of color, shape, effects, reference, and imagery, as a writer ensnares us with words and sentences and paragraphs, as a dancer enthralls us with legs and leaps, as a rock star captures

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us with hips and lips and voice. 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. Beauty, in this equation, is the sum of the charge that an artist, deploying the language of the beautiful, can generate. It is a spark that begins in the intelligence and insight of the artist, is instantiated into material being by her command of the techniques of the beautiful, and is crystallized in the world by its capacity to elicit passion and loyalty and detestation in its beholders, to rally around itself constituencies and against itself enemies. Like all arks and arenas of human value, beauty is historically grounded but also historically contingent. In the Renaissance, where The Invisible Dragon begins its modern history of beauty, masters like Caravaggio were negotiating and reconstructing the relations among the Church, God, man, and society. They were deploying the tools of the beautiful to hook into and renovate primarily theological systems of meaning and human relation. In a liberal, pluralistic, commerce-driven democracy like America, the primary terrain on which beauty was mediated, and in some respects generated, was the art market. To dismiss beauty as just another lubricant of modern capitalism, then, was to miss the point in a succession of catastrophic ways. It was to mistake the last part of that equation, the creation and negotiation of value on and through the art market, for the entirety of it. It was to mistake the exchange of art for other currencies of value, which was a human activity that preceded and would persist after capitalism, for capitalism. It was to believe that the buying and selling of art in modern art markets was a problem at all, when, in fact, it was the only available solution in our given historical configuration of forces. And it was to radically underestimate the capacity of beauty to destabilize and reorder precisely the relations of politics, economy, and culture that its vulgar critics believed it was propping up.

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David with the Head of Goliath (Vienna). 1610. Caravaggio. Oil on canvas. 491/4 × 393/4 in.

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Beauty had consequences. Beautiful images could change the world. In America, risking money or status for the sake of what you found beautiful—by buying or selling that which you found beautiful or by arguing about which objects should be bought or sold on account of their beauty—was a way of risking yourself for the sake of the vision of the good life you would like to see realized. The good guys in Hickey’s story were those who put themselves on the line for objects that deployed the beautiful in ways they found persuasive and pleasure-inducing. They were the artists themselves, whose livelihoods depended on participation in the art market, who risked poverty, rejection, incomprehension, and obscurity if their work wasn’t beautiful enough to attract buyers. They were the dealers, who risked their money and reputation for objects they wagered were beautiful enough to bring them more money and status. They were the buyers, who risked money and ridicule in the hopes of acquiring more status and pleasure. They were the critics, like Hickey, who risked their reputations and careers on behalf of the art that struck them as beautiful and on behalf of the artists whose idiosyncratic visions they found persuasive or undeniable. And finally they were the fans, who desperately wanted to see that which they loved loved by others and to exist in community with their fellow enthusiasts. The good guys were the ones who cared a lot, and specifically. The villains were the blob of curators, academics, review boards, arts organizations, governmental agencies, museum boards, and funding institutions that had claimed for themselves almost total control of the assignment and negotiation of value to art, severing art’s ties to the messy democratic marketplace, which was the proper incubator of artistic value in our society. The blob cared a lot, too, but about the wrong things.

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“I characterize this cloud of bureaucracies generally,” wrote Hickey, “as the ‘therapeutic institution.’”14 In the great mystery of the disappeared beauty, the whodunnit that fueled The Invisible Dragon, it turned out that it was the therapeutic institution that dunnit. It had squirted so many trillions of gallons of obfuscating ink into the ocean over so many decades that beauty, and the delicate social ecosystems that fostered its coalescence, could barely aspirate. Why the therapeutic institution did this, for Hickey, was simple. Power. Control. Fear of freedom and pleasure and undisciplined feeling. It was the eternally recurring revenge of the dour old Patriarch who had been haunting our dreams, since we came up from the desert, with his schemas of logic, strength, autonomy, and abstraction, asserting control against the wiles and seductions of the feminine and her emanations of care, vulnerability, delicacy, dependence, joy, and decoration. It was the expression of God’s anger in the Garden of Eden when Eve and Adam defied Him to bite from the juicy apple of knowledge and freedom. In one of the most extraordinary passages in the book, Hickey turned Michel Foucault, a favorite of the blob, back on the blob. It was Foucault, he wrote, who drew back the curtain on the hidden authoritarian impulse at work in so many of the modern institutions of social order, particularly those systems most committed to the tending of our souls. Such systems weren’t content with establishing regimes of dominance and submission that were merely or primarily external. Appearances can be too deceiving. Too much wildness can course beneath the facade of compliance. It was inner consent, cultivated therapeutically through the benevolent grooming of the institutions, that mattered. Thus the disciplined intensity with which the therapeutic institution had fought its multi-generational war to crowd out and delegitimize the market, where appearance was almost everything and where desire, which is too unpredictably correlated with virtue, was so operative.

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“For nearly 70 years, during the adolescence of modernity, professors, curators, and academicians could only wring their hands and weep at the spectacle of an exploding culture in the sway of painters, dealers, critics, shopkeepers, second sons, Russian epicures, Spanish parvenus, and American expatriates. Jews abounded, as did homosexuals, bisexuals, Bolsheviks, and women in sensible shoes. Vulgar people in manufacture and trade who knew naught but romance and real estate bought sticky Impressionist landscapes and swooning pre-Raphaelite bimbos from guys with monocles who, in their spare time, were shipping the treasures of European civilization across the Atlantic to railroad barons. And most disturbingly for those who felt they ought to be in control— or that someone should be—‘beauties’ proliferated, each finding an audience, each bearing its own little rhetorical load of psycho-political permission.”15 After getting knocked back on their heels so thoroughly, wrote Hickey, the bureaucrats began to get their act together around 1920. They have been expanding and entrenching their hegemony ever since, developing the ideologies, building the institutions, and corralling the funding to effectively counter, control, and homogenize all the unruly little beauties. There had been setbacks to their campaign along the way, most notably in the 1960s, but the trend line was clear. In this dialectic, Mapplethorpe proves an interesting and illustrative figure. He was so brilliant in making his world beautiful that the therapeutic institution had no choice but to gather him in, to celebrate him in order to neutralize him, to pulverize his diversities and convert them into homogeneous statements. But it turned out that he was too quicksilver a talent to be so easily caged, and the blob was overconfident in its capacity to domesticate him. It/they missed something with Mapplethorpe and made the mistake of exposing him to the senator from North Carolina and the prosecutor from Hamilton County, who

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saw through the scrim of institutional mediation. All the therapeutic testimony that followed, in the case of Cincinnati v. Contemporary Arts Center, wasn’t really about defending Mapplethorpe or fending off conservative tyranny. It was about reasserting the blob’s hegemony. In truth, Senator Helms and the therapeutic institution were destabilized by complementary aspects of the same thing, which was pleasure and desire rendered beautiful and specific. “It was not that men were making it then,” wrote Hickey, “but that Robert was ‘making it beautiful.’ More precisely, he was appropriating a Baroque vernacular of beauty that predated and, clearly, outperformed the puritanical canon of visual appeal espoused by the therapeutic institution.”16 Confronted by this beautiful provocation, the conservative and art establishments, whatever they thought they were doing, were in fact collaborating to put Mapplethorpe back in his place. The ostensible triumph of one side was the secret triumph for both.17 It was beauty that lost. The Invisible Dragon was a howl of frustration at this outcome. It was also a guerrilla whistle. Not so fast . . . This was a good story. It was also, to say the least, a flamboyantly prejudicial one. The Invisible Dragon flattened immense complexity into a few simple plotlines. It privileged and flattered the kinds of people Dave Hickey liked (very much including Dave Hickey) to the disadvantage of the types of people he didn’t like. It was brilliantly syncretic and synthetic, entwining disparate arguments, thinkers, historical eras, and realms of discourse into lucid and persuasive narratives, but it was not systematic, and many of its discrete arguments could dematerialize under close inspection. Even Hickey’s basic definitions of beauty, over the course of the short book, diverged and fuzzed. A reader who relied

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on him for an authoritative history of Western art, a balanced assessment of the state of art criticism and scholarship, or a philosophical perspective on beauty that was in fruitful conversation with the main lines in aesthetic philosophy would be led astray. Many of the criticisms that have come Hickey’s way, in the years since The Invisible Dragon was first published, have elaborated on these imperfections of the text, often with much justification. And yet there is the fact, acknowledged even by those who most loathe Hickey, that his book fulfilled its own prophecy. Beauty became the issue of the 1990s in the art world, mostly because of The Invisible Dragon. The book was published in 1993, with a small initial run, to little fanfare. But slowly, and then quickly, it became a phenomenon in the art world, passed from hand to hand, like samizdat, particularly among art students and young artists. It won awards for Hickey and a tenured job with benefits at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. There were panels on beauty and journal symposia. Hickey was flown around to speak on the subject and profiled in art publications. The Invisible Dragon had this effect not because its arguments for beauty were so theoretically tight, or even necessarily understood, but because its attacks on the art critical and curatorial establishment, at a time when it was exerting an immense and often stifling influence on the teaching and practice of art, were so powerful. Hickey wasn’t always fair, but in some basic ways he was right, and he was speaking in tones that resonated with the concerns and anxieties of many people in the art world. And he was so rhetorically devastating. He attacked as a populist, a champion of the common viewer’s instincts and preferences against the dry philosophizing of elite academics and uptight bureaucrats. He also attacked as a highbrow, dancing circles of French theory around the

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middlebrow moralizing of art bureaucrats. He was cooler than the people he was criticizing and more sensitive. He had partied with Warhol and Mapplethorpe and grazed for decades in the glorious meadows of Western culture. He deployed macho diction to effeminize his critical enemies and then accused them of subtle misogyny and homophobia in their critical practices. By the end of the book, he had let the air out of the art establishment at so many different points, from so many directions, that to this day they haven’t been able to effectively neutralize his critique (though time and quiet disdain have marginalized it). Hickey was so potent, ultimately, not because his theory of beauty was superior but because his performance while articulating it was so beautiful. His two-page primer on Foucault did more work, more scintillatingly, than many whole books on the subject. His “Yeah, right” at the end of a short dissection of the contemporary art world’s self-love was brutal, unanswerable, and funny. Once he had written contemptuously of the “ice-white walls” of the contemporary museum and gallery, it was hard to see them as anything else ever again. Seeded with so many small bombs of insight and elegance, so much wit, and so many dazzling connections, the text became a work of art itself. The Invisible Dragon wasn’t perfect. When I came to it, a few years after reading its more perfectly turned successor, Air Guitar, I could see some of the stylistic seams, some of the ways in which Hickey was still trying too hard to prove himself on the page. But so much of it is so gorgeous and brilliant that it tends to outflank, much as Mapplethorpe’s art has done, both its fiercest critics and its best-intentioned advocates. “I saw Robert’s X images for the first time,” Hickey wrote, “scattered across a Pace coffee table at a coke dealer’s penthouse on Hudson Street, and in that context they were just what they would be—a sheaf of piss-elegant snapshots, mementos and naughty bits—photos the artist made when he wasn’t making art, noir excursions into metaphysical masochism

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and trading cards for cocaine. As long as they existed in private circulation, they would remain so: handsome and disturbing images, to be sure, but clandestine artifacts, nevertheless, and peripheral texts at best—like Joyce’s diaries or Delacroix’s erotica. Today the images in The X Portfolio are ‘fine photographs’ and better for it. They hang as authorized images in the oeuvre alongside their pornological predecessors and ancillaries, and that work is richer and rougher for their company. “Even so, hanging there on the wall amidst their sleeker siblings, these images seem so contingent, their ‘artistic’ legitimacy so newly won that you almost expect to see sawdust on the floor. They seem so obviously to have come from someplace else, down by the piers, and to have brought with them, into the world of ice-white walls, the aura of knowing smiles, bad habits, rough language, and smoky, crowded rooms with raw brick walls, sawhorse bars and hand-lettered signs on the wall. They may be legitimate but, like my second cousins, Tim and Duane, they are far from respectable, even now.”18 Early in The Invisible Dragon, Hickey reflected on what it was like to view a Renaissance masterpiece from the comfortable distance of the late twentieth century. It could be “ravishing and poignant,” he wrote, but, at best, the visual experience was an echo of what it once must have been. We simply can’t have the intensity and complexity of reaction that someone alive during the period of its creation could have had, viewing the painting. Not because men and women of the Renaissance were more sensitive, but because so much of any painting’s charge, at any time, derives from its participation in the political and cultural arguments of its era. “The image is quiet now,” he wrote, “its argumentative frisson has been neutralized, and the issue itself drained of ideological urgency, leaving only the cosmetic superstructure of that antique argument.”19

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Pages 30–31 of The Invisible Dragon. Dave Hickey.

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One of the ironies of The Invisible Dragon is that the extraordinary volume of argumentative frisson it generated has left the impression, in its wake, that we are now living with nothing but the cosmetic superstructure, ravishing but hollow. The text, it seems, has gone quiet. The charge has dissipated. That, in fact, the book hasn’t quieted, that it continues to writhe with meaning, suggests a few possibilities. Maybe Hickey was wrong, and beauty is less socially constructed than he proposed. Maybe it’s precisely what he said, and the mistake was in thinking that that initial bout of culture war was the main event. Or maybe “beauty” is the wrong word for what we’re worrying about. Maybe there’s more, or something else, that is at stake.

Everyone got fucked in the turbulence of postwar America. Dave Hickey, interview with the author

One Saturday morning in postwar America, when he was twelve or possibly thirteen, Dave Hickey and his father set out in their Chevy for a jam session on the margins of Fort Worth. On the way, they picked up Magda, a piano-playing neighbor who had learned her craft in Weimar Germany before the Nazis chased her out, and Diego, who played percussion and sang. They pulled up to Ron’s house in a lower-echelon Fort Worth subdivision just as Butch and Julius arrived. Inside, Magda set up in front of the piano. Butch stood up his bass. Julius laid his guitar in his lap while he rolled and lit a joint. Ron took a hit and then sat down at his drum set. Hickey’s father, also Dave, took out his sax and his clarinet. They all tuned and warmed up. Then they played.

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It was a golden afternoon, smoky and loose and suffused with music and camaraderie. Magda was ill at ease at first, comically out of her element, but soon the deeper communion of jazz took over. “Dad swung around, aimed his clarinet at her, and she seemed to wake up,” Hickey later wrote. “In less than a bar, she found herself and started hitting the note, crisply; and the lady had some chops, you know. She could play jazz music, but it was strange to watch, because here in this smoky, shadowy room full of swaying, agitated beboppers was this nice German-Jewish lady in a black voile dress with her back rigid and her eyes glued to the sheet, her wrists lifted in perfect position, playing in such a way that, if you couldn’t hear the music, you would have guessed Schumann or something like that. But Magda was really rapping it out, and she had such great attack that Diego had to sit up straight to sing the choruses.”1 The last song of the afternoon, Johnny Mercer’s “Satin Doll,” was their best, the six of them weaving in and out of each other, soloing and coming together, playing the song but also themselves. As even a thirteenyear-old Dave understood, it was just lovely. “As it turned out,” he wrote, “that satin doll was that. There were no more jam sessions, due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control, and, within three years, my dad was dead. After that, our life remained improvisational, but it was never as much fun. So I kept that musical afternoon as a talisman of memory. I handled it carefully, so as not to knock the edges off, keeping it as plain and unembellished as I could, so I could test the world against it, because it was the best, most concrete emblem I had of America as a successful society and remains so.”2 In April 1955, when Hickey was sixteen, his father shot himself in the garage of the family’s rented home in the South Hemphill Heights neighborhood of Fort Worth.3 The reasons were never clear, though the

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timing was curious.4 Later that day, the family was scheduled to move to a big house in a better neighborhood of Fort Worth. It was to be the first home the Hickeys would ever own rather than rent. When Hickey was old enough to devise a plausibly coherent explanation, he imagined that the weight of it was just too much for his father, who had long been torn between the call of jazz and the yearning for the kind of stable home that he had been denied himself when he was orphaned as a young child. Hickey’s father wanted domesticity, but also didn’t know what to do with it once he had it and was always escaping— to work, to friends’ houses, into drink, to jazz clubs and jam sessions. At one point, when things in his marriage had gotten particularly excruciating, Hickey’s father disappeared entirely for a few months. Perhaps the purchase of the new big house, with its big new mortgage, was more than the pleasure- and freedom-seeking side of him could bear. Now he would have to hold down a square job forever. There was also a history of depression and suicide in the paternal line. Hickey’s father was following in the footsteps not just of his father, who had killed himself in middle age, but also of his grandfather. After the suicide, the prevailing mood in the Hickey home was shame. The register was silence. After finding the body, and calling her own parents, Hickey’s mother went to bed and stayed there. The kids were left to fend for themselves. “One thing that I distinctly remember is that nobody talked to us,” said Hickey’s younger sister Sarah. “The preacher came over, and he went in our mother’s bedroom. Friends would come over and go in our mother’s bedroom. No one talked to us. Dave was left to mow the yard that morning because we were supposed to be moving. We didn’t have any dishes out or silverware. We didn’t really have a home. Everything was packed or had been given away.”5

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Top Sarah, Michael, and Dave Hickey, circa 1945. Right Dave Hickey (lower left), his parents, and his younger sister, circa 1942.

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The acute awfulness of that day was exacerbated, for Hickey, by the kind of visual and sensory detail he later made his name explicating: His mother told him to put on a dark suit and tie before he mowed the lawn. He was out there, sweating and mowing in his scratchy, heat-absorbing suit, utterly alone with his grief and confusion, as people walked silently past him into the house. Before the suicide, the Hickeys hadn’t been a happy family. They had been interesting, though. There were lots of books and art about and always good music on the record player. Cool people circulated in and out. Helen (Balch) Hickey, a middling amateur painter, was a rather fierce person, poorly suited to domestic life but caring in her way and selffocused in a way that liberated her kids to figure it out for themselves. After her husband died, she would return to school to finish her bachelor’s degree, earn a PhD, and teach business and economics at Texas Christian University. She also took over the family flower shop after her parents died and ran it well. Hickey’s father, David Cecil Hickey Jr., had been orphaned at two and raised in the Masonic Home and School in Fort Worth. To all appearances, he had grown into a fine young man, good looking and charming and smart. At the Masonic Home, he had played football on their legendary “Mighty Mites” team, which routinely overmatched bigger and better-funded teams on the strength of its orphan scrappiness. In college at TCU, he played offensive lineman for the Horned Frogs, helping the team to successive wins in the Sugar and Cotton Bowls. He also loved and played jazz and dreamed of making a living at it. After college, around the time when he met and married Helen, he contracted polio. It atrophied his ankle, which freed him from active duty in World War II. Instead, he got an army job setting up warehouses around the country to manage and distribute parts. The family, which by this point included

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Dave, Sarah, and their younger brother Mike, went with him. After the war, he took his experience in parts distribution into a series of jobs with car dealerships, playing music on the side. From very early it was clear that Dave, the firstborn, had a brain to reckon with. At every school he attended, and over the years there were many of them, he excelled quickly and easily. At home, he got a certain kind of wary credit for being so smart. He was “the family genius,” remembered Sarah.6 But he got no quarter. He and his mother clashed, and like his siblings he was a casualty of the ongoing and often intense conflict between his parents, who had never forgiven each other for everything that was disappointing about their lives. The overriding imperative for Hickey at home was to get away. The library was a favorite destination. He liked record stores. He would ride miles on his bike to go to the movies, sometimes spending whole days in the cool theater, heading home only when it was dark, by which time his parents were usually all fought out. As he grew older and more autonomous, Hickey ranged farther. During the sun- and sand-baked year the family spent in Los Angeles, living in a house near the beach, Hickey learned not only how to surf but also to read the water, scouring maps he had obtained from the local Coast Guard office for the precise bathymetric alignment of elevations that produced the best waves. When he had exhausted the local beaches, he began traveling up and down the Southern California coast, hitching rides, finding the best spots, and using his obscure knowledge of the ocean floor to ingratiate himself with older, better surfers. “My pals were amazed,” he later wrote. “They ran their fingers down the coastline on the maps and picked out the spots I had found, and some they had found, too. They liked the juju science of techno-surfing. We were out on the flat ocean leaning over our boards like a conference

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table discussing aquatics. After that, when I fell off a big one, they would yell, ‘Big Wave Dave!’ as they shot past me. Just the jokey name made me feel better. I had outsmarted my stupid feet.”7 There was a Huck Finn quality to Hickey’s childhood. Against a background of crude misery at home, he was free to seek adventure. After his father’s death, he was stuck in Fort Worth but was given an unusually long and loose tether within its borders. His mother found a new place to rent for herself and the younger kids, and Dave stayed with his grandparents, living in a small apartment in back of their house. In exchange for this dispensation, he helped take care of his grandfather, who was dying from Alzheimer’s. He bathed him, took him to the bathroom, cleaned up after him, helped put him to bed. After his grandfather died, Hickey moved to an apartment elsewhere in the neighborhood, truly living on his own until he went off to college. What’s striking in Hickey’s best writing about his childhood, aside from its delicacy, are the ways in which he measures out the good and the bad. He tells the truth about the bad stuff, more or less, but he does it rather quietly. Then he redeems it with such humanity and humor that by the end, the pain has receded from the emotional balance sheet of the work. It becomes the soil from which the beauty blooms. One can glean from reading Hickey closely how awful, in fact, so much of it was—the narcissistic parents and their miserable marriage, the suicide and subsequent abandonment—but one is imprinted by the elation. “It was just before daybreak,” he wrote of his surfing apotheosis. “I was way out beyond the notches that shiver the waves off Ocean Beach in San Diego. I was standing on my board looking out to sea, and there it came, big and steady and hard out of the north and west, like a set at Waimea. I paddled over to my secret shallow place and climbed aboard. My wave kicked over the bump. It rose above the other waves. We were

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flying south and east so the approach was a problem. We were heading for the midsection of the Ocean Beach Pier, and I was not good enough to avoid it at that speed. I thought ‘jump,’ and then I thought ‘fuck it,’ tucked up, and shot the pier.”8 He rather miraculously passed under the pier, then smashed into the rocks on the other side of it, and ended up in the hospital with broken ribs and a deeply bruised and lacerated body. From glorious start to bloody conclusion, it was a great triumph. The week-long convalescence even provided the opportunity to graduate from reading kiddie tales of sea explorers to Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, “a real fucking book.” Even his parents’ anger had its consolation. “My dad came in and told me I was breaking my mother’s heart, and his too, of course. Then he gave me a secret smile like we were in a gulag and quickly retreated because my mother was coming. She stalked into my room. She told me I was breaking her heart, and would I just look at myself, wrapped up like a sore thumb. I felt good. I was breaking their hearts. Damn right! That seemed real, like breaking their legs. There was a frisson of intimacy about it. Even if it was negative, they had noticed me.”9 What all this damage, sensitivity, and sublimity produced in Hickey, among other things, was a desire for environments in which he could enjoy companionship, find pleasure, and keep intimacy at a safe distance. As a freshman at Southern Methodist University, Hickey joined the Kappa Sigma fraternity, transferring to the TCU chapter when he switched schools two years later. It was the first in what would become, over the decades, a series of small communities and subcultures that would, more than anything he had ever experienced at home, feel like home. He was good at carving out a role for himself within a group, and the fraternity life of the late 1950s, early 1960s suited him. He liked

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the casualness of it, hanging out and shooting the shit at the house; he liked the formal balls and dances and the unassuming proximity to money and power. He liked the access it gave him, in a way he had never experienced before, to the regard and affection of women. And there was plenty of room for him, among the deeply secure sons of the Texas elite, to be his more boho self. “I first met Dave at the Hi-Hat Lounge in Fort Worth, which was a hangout for Kappa Sigs,” said Anne Livet, who would become a lifelong friend and art world co-conspirator. “I went with some guy I was dating from Texas Tech. We were sitting in our booth, me in my fuchsia dress and beehive hair, and I looked across the room and saw Tommy Cochran, who was my mother’s godson. He was with a bunch of other guys from Kappa Sig. I knew my mother was throwing a party for the fraternity, because of her friendship with Tommy, and she hadn’t invited me or any of my friends. I went over there and said, ‘Tommy Cochran, your fraternity is having a party at my house next Saturday night, and none of us are invited.’ “Dave looked at me and said, ‘Allow me to introduce myself, darling. My name is Dave Hickey, and you’re invited to the party at your house.’”10 Hickey and Livet went to the party together, where Dave took out his guitar and played goofy folk songs he had written. Livet played her Joan Baez and Bob Dylan records, which were totally new to most of the people in the room. The next night, Hickey invited Livet over to his apartment behind his grandparents’ house, which he had moved back into when he transferred to TCU. He wanted to loan her some books. “He lived in this little bohemia, just on the wrong side of the railroad tracks, loaded with books and records,” Livet told me, “and was totally charming to me. He was so, so smart. The only contemporary literature I’d read were the French existentialists, and he gave me Mailer. He gave me Styron and two of his own things. One of them was a play about

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his father’s suicide. The other was ‘Three Days in a South Texas Spring,’ which is a beautiful little story that would later be published in his collection of stories. So I sat up all night reading all of those. I thought I had met the man for me.”11 Livet and Hickey’s romance would remain unconsummated, but the nature of their friendship was one that would come to characterize many of Hickey’s relationships to women over the decades. He had an ease in the presence of women that he didn’t with men. Around men, he felt the need to perform masculinity or at least to hide vulnerability. With women, he could deploy his masculine charm but also inhabit his more feminine aspects—his vulnerability and sadness, his desire to nurture, his sensuous appreciation of art and music and surfaces. There was also a power dynamic with women that he found comfortable. He was the dominant intellectual partner, admired for his brilliance and appreciated for his cultural guidance. In return, he was giving and loving and empowering. “The one thing that is never really understood or recognized about Dave is that he is incredibly gentle, sometimes to a fault,” said Gary Kornblau, who would later become Hickey’s editor and friend. “It’s not a strategy. He is one of the gentlest people I know, in terms of caring for people and making them feel good. The gentleness keeps people close to him and the narcissism pushes people away. It’s true of his writing, too. It’s a caring and permissive writing, very matriarchal, with a patriarchal narcissistic side to it.”12 In the background of Hickey’s early encounters with Livet was a cultural flavor that would inform his later thinking and writing. He was, and in many ways would remain, enraptured by the spirit of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when an insouciant American confidence enabled rather than inhibited the ingathering of influences from the margins— from Blacks and Latinos, women and gays, Jews and exiles from Europe.

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The tension between the art of outsiders and the culture and economics of the mainstream that would seem intrinsically hostile to many other critics and artists of the next few decades would always, to Hickey, seem an organic complementarity, a creative dialectic. He wasn’t blind to the ways that the state and society oppressed and restricted, but saw evidence all around him that we contained the resources for our own renewal. It was there in television and rock music, abstract expressionism and pop art, James Baldwin in Switzerland and the Frankfurt School in New York. It was Joan Baez and Bob Dylan spinning at a fraternity party or a German refugee playing with a motley crew of black, brown, and redneck jazzheads in a Fort Worth subdivision. The great wealth and power of America produced an abundance that, at its best, allowed and in some cases encouraged the cultivation and flourishing of eccentric, subversive impulses that then had the potential to remake the whole society from the outside in. The essay in which Hickey writes of his father’s jam session is, by its end, a paean to Norman Rockwell, who for Hickey was the great American visual artist of this generous, democratic, and unlikely symphony of forces. “It was Norman Rockwell’s great gift to see that life in twentiethcentury America, though far from perfect, has been exceptional in the extreme,” he wrote. “This is what he celebrates and insists upon: that ‘normal’ life, in this country, is not normal at all—that we all exist in a general state of social and physical equanimity that is unparalleled in the history of humans. (Why else would we alert the media every time we feel a little bit blue?) . . . Artists like Rockwell celebrate ordinary equanimity for the eccentric gift that it is—no less than the bodily condition of social justice in a society informed by forgiving rhyme and illuminated by the occasional shining hour.”13

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It is possible to construct Hickey’s life after college as a quest for those shining hours or for those rare conditions of just right equanimity out of which the occasional shining hours were most likely to emerge. It is possible, too, to construct his artistic journey as an effort to evolve the writerly voice and form through which to share this spirit of democratic generosity and sublimity with others. Ten years ago, when I first tried to write about Hickey (and failed), that is the story I would have told, one with a clear, clean arc and a relatively triumphant hero. But it would have been a mistake. In truth, neither his life nor his art was so linear and did not in any case swerve in parallel. Hickey never had a plan, nor even a good sense of direction. He had a talent for writing, a daimonic intellect, an intuition for where certain kinds of cultural energy were coalescing, and certain tendencies to depression and self-sabotage. His life spun out from there. After graduating from TCU with a degree in English, he attended a series of graduate programs, first studying literature at TCU, then fiction writing at the University of Texas at Austin, and then linguistics, also at the University of Texas. In January 1964, he married Mary Jane Taylor, a Lubbock native and recent graduate from the university. When he could, particularly during the summers between the long academic semesters, Hickey hightailed it to New York, without Mary Jane, immersing himself in the contemporary art scene. He would go to the museums, loiter at the galleries, and hit the dive bars after the openings with the artists, curators, gallerists, and other hangers-on. “At that time in New York there was this sort of ticket thing you could buy that would get you into the Met, the Cloisters, the New York Public Library,” said Hickey. “It was really great if you were from out of town. I would walk over to the top of the park and there was this great pizza place where you could buy a great big giant pizza for $5 and I would have

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it for breakfast and dinner, and I would eat on the street during the day. And go to art galleries mostly.”14 The most formative encounter Hickey had during this time was with the Hungarian-born dealer Leo Castelli and his gallery on the Upper West Side, which was one of the seminal spaces of postwar American art. It was there that Hickey first saw, in real life, the work of artists like Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Robert Rauschenberg. As potent was the physical space itself and the warm glow of Castelli’s benevolent, aristocratic attention. “I loved Leo,” said Hickey. “He was my mentor, sort of. He always called me David. ‘Now, David . . . ’ I loved the way things felt and looked there. That whole neighborhood, the interiors, the gray light, the beveled windows. Leo had that beautiful gray room with a bright purple giant brush stroke of Lichtenstein in it. I wanted to have that room in my house.”15 Over the course of Hickey’s doctoral program, the dissonance kept increasing between what he wanted to be doing, which had something to do with Leo Castelli’s gallery, and what he was formally doing, which was working on a dissertation about the hidden syntactic patterns in Ernest Hemingway’s fiction. During this time, Hickey also began writing for the Texas Observer, an Austin-based magazine that was one of the only publications in the state that was covering the politics and culture of the 1960s from the inside, with real sympathy and sensitivity. For the Observer, he wrote about books, politics, academia, Texas, and, above all, the ways in which art both reflected and, on occasion, reordered the larger worlds of culture and politics.16 In 1967, Hickey finally quit working on his dissertation, and with the consent of his wife, he opened an art gallery in Austin, first on the ground floor of their apartment just north of the university and then in

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Roy Lichtenstein exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery. 1965.

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a commercial space closer to downtown. A Clean, Well-Lighted Place was the first truly contemporary gallery in Austin and one of the first in Texas. During the four years of its existence, it had an outsize influence not just on the Texas contemporary art scene, but also on how curators, gallerists, and buyers on the coasts understood and received Texas art. Hickey liked artists who were funny and colorful and who were in sophisticated conversation with the counterculture and the traditional visual vernacular of the region. His stable included cartoonists like Jim Franklin, who was working in the same countercultural vein as R. Crumb; Mexican-American artists like Mel Casas and Luis Jimenez, both of whom played with classic tropes of Western and Southwestern art; and the surrealist Barry Buxkamper, whom Hickey discovered when Buxkamper was just finishing up his undergraduate fine arts degree at the University of Texas. Hickey wasn’t an extraordinary salesman. The gallery tended to break even, more or less. He was exceptionally attuned, however, to the relationship between art and money and intellectually interested in the market as a proving ground for determining value in art. In an early profile of the gallery, published in the local newspaper, he spoke of how much he liked selling, in particular, to a certain kind of risk-taking businessman. “They like to exercise their judgment on art just like they do on stocks and bonds,” he said. “They realize that acquiring traditional painting is like buying established mutual funds. It’s dull. New art offers them the same challenge that buying stocks over the counter does.”17 In 1971, thanks both to the critical success of A Clean, Well-Lighted Place and to his own increasing presence in New York art circles, Hickey was recruited to run the Reese Palley Gallery in downtown Manhattan, which had launched the prior year with some fanfare but no guiding creative spirit.18 Saying yes wasn’t a hard call for Hickey, who wanted to

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Dave Hickey at his Austin gallery, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. November 13, 1969.

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be closer not just to the center of the art world, but also to the sex, drugs, and music that were even more abundant in New York than in Austin. “I was already sleeping with a lot of women in New York at that time,” said Hickey.19 As with many things in Hickey’s professional life, the gallery was a success but not exactly a stepping-stone. In the year and a half he ran Reese Palley, he helped launch the SoHo gallery scene, hosted important exhibitions, and showed young artists, like David Diao and Jennifer Bartlett, who would go on to make bigger names for themselves.20 While running the gallery, Hickey also wrote a series of four pieces for Art in America that made it clear to those who were paying attention that he had the potential to be a major voice in American art criticism. Stylistically, Hickey’s writing of the period, as with his earlier work in the Texas Observer, was an effort to find a voice that could integrate his interest in high culture and theory with his low church background and his pop cultural affinities. It was also a reckoning with the dissipation of the cultural energies of the 1960s. “Certainly something should be done about the wanton propagation of avant-garde art movements,” he wrote in Art in America in spring 1972. “They breed like mayflies only to die like them. . . . Watching them appear so regularly, you know what a Transylvanian neighbor of Dr. Frankenstein must have felt like. Every other fall a new monster comes trundling down from the castle—saddle-stitched, with one leg shorter than the other, and the arms mismatched.”21 One can detect in the piece—as well as in the other three that Hickey would write for the magazine before he joined its staff as executive editor the following year—a number of themes that would receive fuller attention later in his career. He was already fascinated by the relationship of geography and topography to art and frustrated by the way in which critics and historians shoehorn far too much into a linear and

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implicitly condescending frame of what it is to be “regional.” He had a complicated relationship with Texas. He thought curators and art dealers tended to slice up art stupidly, “based on the silly historical premise . . . that everyone in the same vicinity at the same time is going in the same direction—a little like assuming that everyone driving on the L.A. Freeway Exchange at five in the afternoon is going to Pasadena.”22 The most influential of Hickey’s Art in America essays was his long piece on land art, “Earthscapes, Landworks and Oz,” which was early and long and brilliant enough to lay down an unavoidable marker on the plains of land art criticism, one that is still regularly referenced today.23 The best of the quartet, however, was his last, “The Texas to New York via Nashville Semi-Transcontinental Epiphany Tactic.” Despite the gonzo name, the essay was an elegant and surprisingly mature meditation on the ironies of travelling in search of civilization from Fort Worth to Austin and then Austin to New York, only to discover at each point closer to the metropole that the joke is on you and them. Some of the deepest-dyed rubes are in the City, and what sophistication and artistic vitality you do find there, often as not, were imported precisely from the hinterlands you just left. “Which isn’t to say that Texas is a nice place,” he wrote. “It isn’t. But home, in the twentieth century, is less where your heart is, than where you understand the sons-of-bitches. Especially in Texas, where it is the vitality of the sons-of-bitches which makes everything possible, where there is more voracious mercantile energy, more vanity and more pretentiousness than anyplace I’ve been—excepting Manhattan. Of such stuff are cultural communities made. Chicago has the energy, and California has the vanity, but you need both: the money first and then the guts and inclination to dump it into dumb things like Art and Astrodomes—because then, even without money, there are extravagant risks which can be taken—on the chance that they will make art. More

Dave Hickey at the Dripping Springs Reunion concert in 1970.

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often, of course, they only make a splash of chrome and flesh across some highway intersection—like a butterfly across a windshield. But it is that sense of possibility, which has been able to sustain itself, that I most value.”24 In late 1972, Hickey came back from a trip to Iowa City to find his boss Reese Palley, a flamboyant entrepreneur and showman who had made his fortune selling high-priced tchotchkes on the Atlantic City boardwalk, sitting in the gallery with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Palley wanted Hickey to put together a show of Ono’s work. Hickey refused. He didn’t like Ono personally, didn’t like her work, and fiercely resisted the idea of privileging her borrowed celebrity. “We had a level of cool that didn’t admit Yoko, or even the Beatles,” said Hickey.25 So he quit and soon after went to work as an editor at Art in America. In truth, the Ono incident was as much an opportunity for him as a crisis. Running the gallery had started to bore him. He was also increasingly lost in an intoxicating and decentering haze of opportunity, pleasure, excitement, and novelty. In Austin he had been pleasure-seeking, but he and his wife were embedded in a community of artists, academics, and small business owners who knew them as a couple, and who had expectations of him. There were structures in place and limits to the opportunities. He was even a member of the Chamber of Commerce. In New York, his sybaritic opportunities expanded while the structures evaporated. He started doing more and more drugs, primarily amphetamines. He flamed out at Art in America after a few issues. He spent more and more time in Nashville, where he was mixing with country music singers, particularly “outlaw” country singers like Waylon Jennings and Billy Joe Shaver. And he continued to sleep with women other than his wife. He and Taylor wouldn’t officially divorce until the early 1980s, but they

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separated in the mid-1970s. It was a surprisingly amicable split, and the two would remain friendly after their separation and divorce. “The 70s were kind of a blur to me, and I wasn’t even doing drugs,” said Mary Jane (Taylor) Crook. “Dave has a very good heart, and I think he is truly generous in the way he shares the world with others. I just always felt I am really lucky to be around this guy. He’s showing me things about the world I wouldn’t ever know except for being with him. He has his own way of looking at the world and analyzing it. I never had any bad feelings about him. Life just happens.”26 When he left Art in America, Hickey floated loose. He bounced back and forth between New York and Nashville, occasionally retreating to his mother’s home in Fort Worth. He stopped writing about art almost entirely. Instead, he covered rock and country music, writing about Boz Scaggs for Penthouse, Aerosmith for Creem, Lou Reed for Oui, Tom Waits for the Village Voice, and a host of country artists for Country Music. He began writing a book (never completed) on the outlaw country scene. He also began writing country songs, briefly on contract for Tompall Glaser’s recording studio in Nashville, which was a center of the scene. His songs, including two that were recorded by singer Bobby Bare, were good enough to make him some money but never, in the end, quite good enough to distinguish him. He was a “B+ songwriter,” he later admitted.27 For Hickey, Nashville in the 1970s was what New York had ceased to be, a place where genuinely new art was being made and a vital new milieu being formed. It was also familiar in ways that the Northeast, for all its attractions, wasn’t. He recognized the food, the people, the landscape. Even the naked vulgarity of Nashville, “the plastic rose capital of the world,” reminded Hickey of Fort Worth, with the bonus that it wasn’t Fort Worth. It was a city where he understood the sons-ofbitches but wasn’t related to them. The singers Hickey was writing about and befriending weren’t artistic radicals like the postwar painters

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who had earlier enthralled him; they were looking back to the roots of country music and sideways to folk and whatever it was that Bob Dylan was doing. But that stripping down appealed to Hickey, too. “I am coming along to witness the rather unusual occurrence of a recording artist trying to be honest about himself,” he wrote in a profile of Tompall Glaser. “When you hear him singing, there is no put-on, no lack of sincerity.”28 Hickey began dating Marshall Chapman, a country singer and songwriter from South Carolina whom he first met at the Exit/In, one of the main haunts of the Nashville scene. It was a stormy romance, though one with a strong enough core of love and connection that the two would remain friends after the relationship ended. Among the songs they wrote together while dating, perhaps the most telling was “We Don’t Go Together (But We Do),” which Chapman released on her 1979 album Marshall, after the two were no longer together. She sang: “Late last night at the party/We were feeling no pain/I was hitting on a bottle of booze/You were doing cocaine/When I got tired/And you got wired/ They all said Mr. Ego and Ms. Id will never get it together/But we did.” Decades later, when Hickey was awarded a half-million dollar MacArthur Foundation fellowship, Chapman would fax him an affectionate invoice for everything he still owed her for all the tsuris he caused during the years they were together. It included charges for debris clean-up, back rent, therapy, car damage, fire damage, and $219,000 for “sex (just to shut him up!).”29 Hickey’s music writing of the mid-to-late 1970s was in many ways a regression from the work he had done for Art in America. He could always write interesting sentences, and could occasionally see down into the deep grammar of American popular music and the subterranean spaces where it spoke and mingled and merged with the language of American culture and politics. That he was in Nashville in the first Facing  Fax from Marshall Chapman to Dave Hickey.

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place, at the center of a movement that would transform country music, was testament to his nose for important art. But his style got captured for a while by some of the tools and tricks of New Journalism, by the baroque flourishes and extended free associational digressions and soliloquies. His best work of the period, then, tended to come not in publications like the Village Voice and Penthouse and Creem, where he was allowed or encouraged to roam free, but in Country Music, where he mostly had to play ball with the standard formulae of magazine journalism. Hickey’s best music writing of the 1970s was melancholy. It mixed the elation of seeing artists like Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings and Dolly Parton perform at the peak of their talents and charisma with the sadness of witnessing the scene itself slowly asphyxiate, a victim of its own success. “By accident of being in the right bar at the right time,” he wrote in 1974, “I got to tag along to the party that was held after the Nashville Songwriters Association banquet, at which Willie was inducted into the Hall of Fame, and found myself sitting in a room with a few million dollars’ worth of songwriting talent. To steal a line from Scott Fitzgerald, I felt like Donald Duck pencilled into da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper.’ It was a very heavy crowd and not particularly sedate, until Willie walked up on the stage and started singing, and things got quiet. The best was singing to the best. Willie started singing his hits, each one greeted with applause, ‘Funny How Time Slips Away,’ ‘Night Life,’ ‘Me and Paul’ . . . and as hit followed hit the applause began to be accompanied by heads shaking in open-mouthed amazement as the men in the room began to realize just how many great songs Willie had written. Guys were slumped back in their chairs with silly incredulous grins on their faces. A voice from the audience said, ‘Hell, Willie, what didn’t you write?’ and Willie just kept on playing ‘Pretend I Never Happened.’ Not very likely. ‘Bloody Mary

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By 1977, the high-wire on which Hickey had been living was badly frayed. He had been without a steady job for years, didn’t really have a home, just barely patched together a living from freelance work, and was increasingly strung out on speed and cocaine. He was a difficult writer for editors to work with under the best of circumstances, and these weren’t those. As a result, even the freelance work was disappearing. The pleasure and excitement were real, but so was the depression, addiction, and dysfunction. As time passed, the balance shifted toward the latter. “I still don’t exactly understand that period of my life,” Hickey said. “Very druggy, and very country music, and women. It was such a mess, a fucking disaster.”31 In February of that year, Hickey wrote what turned out to be his last essay for Country Music, which had been the steadiest of his gigs. “I am writing, as usual, in the predawn hours under desperate circumstances in Nashville’s incomparable Americana Apartments. That much hasn’t changed, but everything else has. .  .  . in Nashville these days, you just caint git outlaw enough.”32 Nashville, Hickey wrote, had re-made itself to an extraordinary degree in the image of the outlaw singers who had evolved their personae and

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Morning,’ and Willie had got hold of an electric guitar and played an extended lead break. More shaking of heads. “Then he started into new songs and as the lines rolled out, snapping together with a frightening simplicity, spontaneous applause breaks out during the songs, a great phrase, a good hook, a blunt truth. This is professional applause, and the best kind of praise, the kind that comes from the men who understand the difficulty of what is being done with such apparent ease. . . . And Willie, he just kept playing.”30

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music in conscious rejection of the modern country sound and look that the city had, until the day before yesterday, been peddling. Ironically, inevitably, this dialectic of fame and influence had so changed things that there was less and less room for precisely the subcultural dynamics in which singers like Jennings and Nelson had developed their art. “Waylon has found his new star quality a little hard on his social life,” Hickey wrote. “It’s tough, you know, to shoot pinball while a posse of 35 Rodeo Fonzies cluster about, copying your moves and saying, ‘Hey, cool, Waylon; wow, man.’ So Waylon has retreated, moved his offices out of Glaser Brothers’ studio (which was beginning to look like a Gunsmoke rerun) and replaced nearly his entire staff.”33 Soon after, Hickey retreated, too. Things were increasingly volatile with Chapman, and after contracting a bad case of pneumonia, he moved back to Fort Worth to live with his mother, where he would end up staying for years. “When I got there,” Hickey said, “I was so fucked up I couldn’t follow the plot in I Dream of Jeannie. I’d been living on uppers and downers forever. I was in terrible shape.”34 There is a story of Hickey’s life that basically ends here, or is never told at all. It’s the story of a journeyman magazine writer who had exhibited some flashes of brilliance but was too undisciplined personally to ever do the kind of writing that left an imprint on the world. He might have been a minor character in someone else’s Nashville novel, an overeducated redneck rock journalist and occasional songwriter who lived fast, loved hard, wrote a few good things, and then died off-camera and was eulogized, if at all, in passing. That the story doesn’t end there is a small miracle. Not because what got Hickey back on his feet was so atypical. His mother was there for him, as was his next girlfriend and his old friends. He also turned out

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to have reserves of tenacity and resilience that his father, faced with his own depression and midlife crisis, hadn’t been able to summon. And he had his talent, which was intact enough to get him work on the other side of his convalescence. What was miraculous was not that he got healthy-ish. People do get well, or at least better. It was what’s always extraordinary about the realization of artistic talent in the world, which is that some of us have within us, amid and entangled with all the cracks and fissures, something that is capable of generating in its wake a magic that is so much greater than us, and that the world, bent and spiky as it so often can be, can on occasion provide havens in which such talent can be cultivated and expressed and appreciated and socialized. This is a gift.

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His writing aroused genuine personal rancor, and this was distressing because he is not a personal person. He is, in fact, a third-person person who writes art criticism because it is third-person writing. Now people actually hated him (the word “loathsome” was bandied about). Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon

He was completely misrepresented, and Dave was sadly a cause of his misrepresentation. Gary Kornblau, interview with the author

Our culture reserves a special resentment for those in positions of authority who refuse to wield their power in the ways prescribed. Thus the incredible anger provoked by a critic who issues no judgments and constructs no rules, but instead rhapsodizes about what he loves, aiming not to convince you of its worthiness but to demonstrate that such love is possible. Jarrett Earnest, “The Inside Outsider: On Dave Hickey’s Criticism,” Los Angeles Review of Books

In April 1996, the Armand Hammer Museum at UCLA opened a new exhibition, Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist Art History. It included the first staging of Chicago’s monumental feminist installation in eight years, along with work by dozens of other feminist artists of the previous few decades. It was a big show and a big deal for the museum and its young guest curator, Amelia Jones. Given the dust-up that followed, it’s easy to interpret the exhibition as more deliberately provocative than in fact it was. Jones certainly had a curatorial agenda. She was taking aim at the critics, including many feminist critics, who had condescended to The Dinner Party, a massive banquet table featuring honorary place settings for thirty-nine real and

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fictional great women of history. But Jones wasn’t gratuitously throwing bombs, and the social context of the exhibition didn’t appear to be especially fraught. Los Angeles was a big city, but its professional visual art community was small, and most of the players knew and were supportive of each other. Even back East in New York, where there was more political free energy in the atmosphere, controversy was the exception rather than the rule. There was good reason to believe it would all go down pretty smooth. “I was a nobody in the art world,” said Jones. “I had finished my PhD in 1991, and was teaching at UC Riverside. They could have just ignored me.”1 The show opened to good attendance and good buzz, including a long feature story in the Los Angeles Times that focused on the reunion of thirteen of the almost four hundred women who had first helped Chicago build, decorate, drape, and set the table back in 1979.2 Then, on May 2, fewer than two weeks after the opening, the LA Times published a brutal review of the show by critic Christopher Knight. It was, wrote Knight, “the worst exhibition I’ve seen in a Los Angeles museum in many a moon.” The most grievous sin, in Knight’s view, was the subordination of the art to the heavy hand of Jones’s curatorial agenda. “‘Sexual Politics’ isn’t really about art at all,” he wrote. “Instead, it’s a history of contemporary feminist theory. . . . Lengthy object-labels and preachy didactic panels direct the audience in proper theoretical viewing of the art. With a curator who is an ideologist, theory is privileged over practice. Art is thus misused, its efficacy undermined by curatorial trivialization. You want to run screaming from the room.”3 Knight’s review was followed by a longer and even more contemptuous essay by critic Libby Lumpkin in Art issues, an LA-based magazine of art criticism and theory to which Amelia Jones and Christopher Knight were also contributors. Lumpkin argued that Jones had erred

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by resurrecting The Dinner Party, which was “kitsch, nothing more and nothing other, a blatant, popular artifact rendered ludicrous by its higher aspirations.” Jones had then picked the wrong art and artists to accompany the piece, mis- and over-contextualized most of it, and cloaked the whole thing in such a wet blanket of up-with-sisterhood feminism that the art came to seem rather pointless. If art is just reduced to politics or theory or therapy by other means, who really cared? Why not go to a protest or a seminar or a healing circle instead? “‘Sexual Politics’ presents feminist art,” wrote Lumpkin, “as a refuge from the risky world outside—a safe ‘woman house,’ an exclusive cult of sisterhood in which no one wins and no one loses, and everyone means well.”4 In the broader context of the 1990s art world, which was characterized by a number of high-profile culture war encounters, the disturbance around Jones’s show was pretty mild. The public came out in significant numbers to see the show, as they typically had for The Dinner Party in the past. No angry mayors or senators crashed the discourse. No funding was threatened or pulled. From afar, it was a win for the museum and a win for its curator. The Dinner Party went on to find a permanent home at the Brooklyn Museum and was assimilated into the critical canon of feminist art in a way it hadn’t been prior, thanks in part to Jones’s advocacy. As for Jones, she went on to become a professor and dean at USC and a highly respected curator and catalogue essayist. Yet, in the moment, it was quite traumatic for her. Her anticipated triumph, her first major coup as a curator, was met with critical derision and rejection. “It was a humiliating experience for an emerging scholar,” she said. “It was super hurtful. Also, I was an Art issues critic, so I was being attacked by the people I wrote for.”5 After the show came and went, Jones worked to understand what fault lines she had inadvertently triggered. What had been her transgression,

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and what did it mean for both the broader discourses of art criticism and history and her own practice as a theorist and curator? In a long and fascinating essay she published a few years later,6 Jones wrote that she had mistakenly thought the art world was fighting just one culture war in the 1990s, with the expressive artists and art lovers squaring off against the uptight, censorious conservatives. Mapplethorpe v. the Hamilton County Sheriff. Andres Serrano v. the American Family Association. In truth, she now realized, there was another war going on, this one within the art world. On one side were those like Jones who believed that leftist politics and critical theory were essential tools in deconstructing and demystifying old ideas of beauty and taste. On the other side, she wrote, was the beauty brigade, the defenders of those hoary old concepts and their thinly veiled retrograde politics. In particular, the enemy was Dave Hickey, who hadn’t said a word about her exhibition but was Lumpkin’s husband, Knight’s friend, the key figure in the critical milieu around Art issues and the LA Times, and the author of The Invisible Dragon, which was the central text of the aesthetic counterreformation and the single most influential art book of the decade. “My text, then,” wrote Jones, “does not pretend to offer a history or theory of aesthetics but, rather, is posed in a polemical way to intervene in a particular position, exemplified by Hickey’s work, which holds a great deal of international status within art discourse at this moment.”7 Her essay, “‘Every man knows where and how beauty gives him pleasure’: Beauty Discourse and the Logic of Aesthetics,” was primarily an argument for why we should treat the discourse of beauty with great suspicion. For centuries, she wrote, it had served both to privilege certain political perspectives and to naturalize and therefore obscure that privileging under ostensibly universal appeals to taste or visceral response or the aesthetic sense. What was most striking about Jones’s essay, however, was the anger it exhibited toward Hickey, someone

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with whom she had had little personal and no critical contact. In The Invisible Dragon, she wrote, Hickey “unctuously” claimed intellectual descent from the Victorian critic John Ruskin and “grotesquely” referred to Robert Mapplethorpe as “Robert,” as though the two were BFFs. He deployed Mapplethorpe’s art in an “authoritarian” fashion and drafted in the wake of Mapplethorpe’s objectification of black male sexuality. Jones seemed even to imply that Hickey was in denial about his own prurient interest in Mapplethorpe’s photos, “his desire to penetrate the mysteries of ‘Robert’s’ works.” If anything, for Jones, Hickey was much worse than his beauty-loving white male forebears like Immanuel Kant and Ruskin. They at least had the excuse of living before twentieth-century theory had excavated the hidden racism, sexism, and colonialism in the traditional constructions of what counted as beautiful. Hickey, on the other hand, was trying to reassert the primacy of beauty in a political context in which its reactionary implications were already visible.8 In the climax to the essay, Jones wrote of her own attraction to Renee Cox’s photograph Yo Mama, which was a nude self-portrait of the Jamaican-American artist holding her son in her arms like the baby Jesus. The homage to Cox was Jones’s deliberate effort to model how to value art without participating in the kinds of deformations she saw in Hickey’s writing, and it was an almost painfully vulnerable stretch of writing. Jones wrote, “Let me project my own partiality for Cox—her body (I want it for my own, to be it as well as, perhaps, but this is deeply repressed, to possess it), and her mind (I want to mimic what I perceive as her conceptual brilliance and ironic sense of humour). I want to align myself definitively with Cox’s strength of mind and body, as I perceive these being expressed in this taut body-image of a strong naked woman who is at once sexualized object, threatening (masculinized) muscular black female subject, and maternal subject. In my sometimes pain at being

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RM. 2007. Elizabeth Peyton. Direct gravure etching with aquatint in black ink on Shikoku Surface Gampi paper, hand torn. 17 × 13 in.

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white, with the negative responsibilities this entails in Western patriarchy, and experiencing the inevitable privilege that my ‘visible’ bodily appearance assigns me in this culture, I want to be this someone else.”9 The key theoretical point for Jones was that in writing about Yo Mama in this way, she was owning every aspect of what she prized about the work and its creator. She liked the politics, which aligned with her own critique of the Western art tradition and of its valorization of white skin and male power. She was erotically drawn to the tautness and symmetry and evident fecundity of Cox’s body. And she welcomed Cox’s reproach of whiteness as well as her invitation to identify with blackness; in tandem, these suggested an ethically responsible path forward for artists and art lovers who didn’t want to continue to be complicit in the oppressive habits of Western art. All of these modes of attractions bundled together might coalesce into something one might choose to call “beauty,” if one really wanted, but for Jones that wasn’t the point. The point was to practice a fundamentally different orientation to interpreting and valuing art. “I am here,” wrote Jones, “I judge and give meaning—on the basis of what my particular investments are, on the basis of a specific, highly politicized argument I am trying to make. I am cognizant that I thereby participate in the circuit of meaning ascribed to the author-subject Renee Cox. If I am persuasive, I may entice some of my readers to identify with the positions I outline here (and to agree with my admiration for the ‘beauty,’ power, and political efficacy of Cox’s fantastic image). If I am not, you may dislike the picture and even continue to believe in the immutable authenticity of Dave Hickey’s judgments. Either way, it behooves all of us to recognize that beauty—there’s no doubt about it— is in the eye of the beholder.”10 By the time Jones first published “Every man knows where and how beauty gives him pleasure” in 1999, Hickey was about as big a deal in the

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art world as it was possible for a critic to be. The Invisible Dragon had been a somewhat underground phenomenon. Air Guitar, which came out in 1997, was a straight-up phenomenon. It sold a staggering number of copies for a work of art criticism, helped land Hickey a tenured job at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and rocketed him to the front of the line when it came to high-paying and high-prestige invitations to lecture and write catalogue essays. It had even made its way far enough outside the art world to reach me, a recent college graduate and wannabe writer working on the remote margins of the film industry. His presence was inescapable in those spheres of the art world where Jones and her fellow critics and academics lived and wrote. It’s all the more surprising then, or maybe not surprising at all, that Jones mischaracterized Hickey’s writing as thoroughly as she did. There were sentences and paragraphs of Hickey’s that could be interpreted in the way that Jones took them, as straightforward declarations of the universality and immutability of beauty. The overwhelming weight of Hickey’s books and essays, however, proposed something like the opposite. For Hickey, as for Jones, beauty was fundamentally a social and political construct. It wasn’t just something about which people argued, but was constituted out of the very arguments about what counted as beautiful or as more beautiful than the thing on the shelf or the wall next to it. He even relied on the same key word that Jones used, “investment,” to characterize the ways beauty was socially conjured. “What if,” Hickey wrote in Air Guitar, “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 to any intention they might embody?”11

Golden Glow (detail). 1995. Alexis Smith. Three mixed-media collages (each 29 × 24 in.)

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Hickey was skeptical of interpretations that leaned too heavily on straightforwardly political or economic explanations for why people were or weren’t likely to invest in a given work; in this respect, he differed from Jones, who was clear about her debt to Marxist and feminist thinking. But he had no preference for apolitical, ahistorical notions of what beauty was. Beauty was that set of properties in visual appearance that elicited pleasure and attention in people, and it was related in complex ways to what people hated and loved, dreamed and feared, were or weren’t capable of thinking in a given historical moment. The line-up of winners and losers was changing all the time, as various players, ideologies, politics, economics, tastes, and fashions drove some into and out of the canon and others toward oblivion. Hickey’s own earliest education in the discourse of beauty was anything but universal or classical; it came instead through the extremely specific and contingent milieu of postwar American car culture. “For me, cars were not just art, they were everything,” Hickey wrote in 1996, around when Jones was staging her exhibition. “Even my first glimmerings of higher theory arose out of that culture: the rhetoric of image and icon, the dynamics of embodied desire, the algorithms of style change, and the ideological force of disposable income. All these came to me couched in the lingua franca of cars, arose out of perpetual exegesis of its nuanced context and iconography. And it was worth the trouble, because all of us who partook of this discourse, as artists, critics, collectors, mechanics, and citizens, understood its politico-aesthetic implications, understood that we were voting with cars—for a fresh idea of democracy, a new canon of beauty, and a redeemed ideology of motion. We also understood that we were dissenting when we customized them and hopped them up—demonstrating against the standards of the republic and advocating our own refined vision of power and loveliness.”12

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That Jones missed this historicism, which is pervasive in Hickey’s writing, makes sense when one recognizes that her real target wasn’t Hickey’s published work, which seemed to slide away from her gaze, but his persona and his crew and what they represented within the political and cultural ecosystems of the 1990s. In that matrix, Hickey and his allies could seem like, and in some cases were, structural bedfellows of the political conservatives who were attacking contemporary art for being too black, too queer, and too secular. And Hickey, as a persona and public figure, wasn’t able or willing to extricate himself from this perception. Too often he chose instead to poke his finger in the eyes of the people who were mad at him, to play on stage the asshole they assumed and very much wanted him to be (the better to dismiss his critiques).13 There were real theoretical conflicts between Jones and Hickey, but with one important exception they weren’t the ones Jones addressed in her essay. Hickey was not a wannabe commissar, dispensing objective assessments of aesthetic value. Nor was he ignorant or contemptuous of twentieth-century theory. The Invisible Dragon and Air Guitar are unimaginable without Hickey’s sustained love affair, in particular, with French theorists like Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.14 What Hickey was—and in this he truly was at odds with Jones—was a sentinel at the border of art’s autonomy, someone for whom great art, along with everything else that it could be, was intrinsically ineffable. Both theory and politics, for Hickey, could serve as the raw ore of art. They could be its handmaiden or dancing partner. But they could never be its master or perfect mirror. Language itself was inadequate to the task. For Jones, it was ethically necessary to explicitly own her investment in art as overtly as possible and ethically deficient to rhetorically obscure one’s investments through the artful use of language. For Hickey, this was backwards. It was only through the artful use of language, through

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a well-honed erotics of art, that one could maintain the proper distance or adjacency from the work.15 The cherry on top, for Hickey, was that it was precisely this kind of activity, oriented around the art one loved, that was most likely to have salutary political effects. “The language we produce before the emblem of what we are, what we know and understand, is always more considered,” he wrote in a 1996 piece on Gustave Flaubert. “This language aims to teach, to celebrate our knowledge rather than our wonder. It also implies that we, and those like us, are at least as wonderful as the work we know so much about. The language that we share before the emblem of what we lack, however, as fractious and inconsequent as it often seems, creates a new society. It is nothing more or less than the kiss that makes us equal.”16 In 2009, the University of Chicago Press reissued The Invisible Dragon. In place of the creamy white matte cover of the original, with the Ed Ruscha study of the LA County Museum on fire and the title enveloped in a curl of dragon flame, there was now a purely typographic cover design embossed on a shimmery black dust jacket. Just inside was a new frontispiece image, Scott Grieger’s witty Squares Masquerading as Artists, supplanting another Ruscha of the county museum on fire. Even the old epigraph, Patti Smith’s pitch-perfect lament for her late friend and lover Robert Mapplethorpe, was gone. “He found it was as easy to hurl beauty as anything else,” Smith had said. Now there was a more enigmatic line from the eighteenth-century novelist and playwright Pigault-Lebrun: L’aimable siecle ou l’homme dit a l’homme, Soyons freres, ou je t’assomme. “Those glorious days, when man said to man, Let us be brothers, or I will knock you down.” Both books were tactile and cool, but the old one had aura and the new one didn’t. Some of the loss was just the natural decay of time and shifting context. An indie press rebelling against the establishment was always more likely to generate aura than a university press reissuing a

Study #3 for Los Angeles County Museum on Fire. 1968. Ed Ruscha, gunpowder and pencil on paper. 75/8 × 149/16 in.

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classic. But the disenchantment was also likely deliberate. Hickey didn’t want to relive the glory days, nor did he want to be seen as trying to. “First, understand this,” wrote Hickey in the introduction to the new edition. “The four essays that open this book are not characteristic of his writing. They are perfectly sincere, and he still believes everything he wrote in these essays. He just can’t believe he wrote them. He imagines himself a teddy bear, the master of the sleepy wave. Usually, when he writes, he keeps a relaxed hand on the rein, the better to veer out of control at the slightest provocation. The four essays that open this book—written in response to great provocation—never veer. Tendrils of black smoke curl from between the words. Whiffs of bad juju rise from the pages. Their ambience of hallucinated intensity and icy aggression is, perhaps, not that forgiving of everyday human fecklessness.”17 Hickey was embarrassed about aspects of the writing that weren’t as controlled as he might have liked. He was genuinely sorry that he had hurt some feelings and maybe even some careers. He hadn’t meant to. It was personal, but not in that way. In the new edition, he also showed a wistful affection for the days when he had believed that both he and his nemeses still mattered when it came to the creation, reception, and dissemination of art in their time. He had taken for granted that, however successful or unsuccessful he might be in his effort to fight the power, the power to critically influence the culture would persist in some form. He never expected that it would just evanesce, as in the years since first publishing The Invisible Dragon it largely had. In such a context, he couldn’t re-up the old book without acknowledging that the power he had fought had mostly deflated in the meantime. “Even today,” he wrote, “with the evil ghosts pretty much defunct, they still inhabit these writings as absent adversaries. The reader must reimagine them to make the tone feel right.”18

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There was an irony in Hickey’s concern that his latter-day readers wouldn’t be able to easily imagine the tone or force of the people he was writing against. In 2009, this anxiety was plausible. The art world had both expanded and fractured to the point where no person, school, museum, university department, or magazine had sufficient power or coherence to shape a dominant discourse or provoke a meaningful reaction. By 2020, however, it was clear that the orthodoxies and tendencies that Hickey was resisting back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when they existed in their concentrated form in academia and the art world, hadn’t so much evaporated as percolated down to the groundwater of American culture, welling up from there to infuse whole new realms of cultural and political life, rendering more legible than ever what was most dissident in his writing. It had not lost the dialectical charge he feared it would, though the landscape of contestation had spread out and diffused. The therapeutic institution, the blob, was everywhere and everything, issuing judgments at a million miles a second on Twitter. In this landscape, Hickey’s criticisms of the puritanical vein in contemporary culture, particularly left-wing culture, were utterly comprehensible. What was in danger of being lost, or inadequately noticed, was what Jones and many others had missed in the first place, which were the ways in which Hickey had always diverged from the caricatures of him as the beauty guy or as the bad boy of art criticism. He could be a bad boy, but also a sweet one. He theorized beauty, but less persuasively and interestingly than he theorized and deconstructed the institutions and mechanisms in and through which beauty was generated, negotiated, and too often obscured or denigrated. His true field was not aesthetics, but the sociology or politics of beauty. Also, and maybe above all, he wasn’t just theorizing or polemicizing; he was making his own art, painting his own canvases, with visual art and theory and politics as pigments.

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Text. 1992–1993. Sarah Charlesworth. Gelatin silver print. 26 × 31 in.

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When it came to this Hickey, the most useful critical response was never likely to be found within the academic art world, where the legacy arguments were too thick and the disciplinary expectations too rigid to allow for a clear-eyed view of Hickey as an essayist. It coalesced instead, mostly implicitly, in how and how often Hickey was quoted in the work of other critics, essayists, and magazine writers. He was deployed less as theorist than as poet, philosopher, or wit: for the stage-setting epigram, the imagistic insight, the mot juste, the dead-on sentence of praise or condemnation that affixes in the reader’s mind. Perhaps the most sustained and subtle appreciation of Hickey came in 2000, the year after Jones’s attack, from the Princeton philosopher Alexander Nehamas. To that point in his own career, Nehamas had only written about art and beauty as by-products of his interest in philosophers like Socrates, Plato, Foucault, and Nietzsche. In a long review in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Nehamas took stock of The Invisible Dragon and Air Guitar and another recent book on beauty, Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just, and concluded that they were all wrong. Beauty was not “justice made visible,” as Scarry had it, nor was it that which elicits pleasure, as Hickey often said. Both arguments collapsed under close inspection, as did their ancient and modern predecessors. Beauty wasn’t, for Nehamas, a thing at all so much as an invitation and a seduction. It was “a promise of happiness . . . an intimation that what stands before us is valuable in ways we do not yet understand.”19 It was a quality in things that drew us in with the promise, possibly false, that if we engage with them further, our lives will become richer and better. Why and how this was the case was a complex argument that Nehamas would ultimately develop into his remarkable 2007 book, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art. What it meant when it came to Hickey, among other things, was that we were reading him wrong if we thought the most important question

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was whether he was right or wrong about beauty. What we should care about more, for Nehamas, was whether our individual encounter with Hickey provoked a desire to know him more, to extend indefinitely into the future that encounter, and to open ourselves to whatever might change in us and in our world as a result. “A beautiful thing only invites us further into itself,” Nehamas wrote. “And the further we go into it, the further we need to go into everything else, for it is only by seeing how each thing is related to the rest of the world that we understand what it is: we cannot do one without the other. . . . Beauty is a call to adventure, a symbol of risk.”20 That Hickey didn’t always get beauty exactly right, for Nehamas, was not a serious mark against him because Hickey himself was beautiful, which was to say the encounter with his writings on beauty (and other things) was richly seductive. Hickey may have been too hard on museums and academic critics and modernist art, as Nehamas believed he was, and too soft on art dealers and capitalism, but both his harshness and his indulgence invited and allowed for creative response. He was wrong that beauty was “largely a quantitative concept,” a final tally on a scoreboard that registered the number of the people who liked a given thing, the amount of talk or money they were willing to devote to liking it, and the success they had in etching their likes on the body public. But such an orientation toward art had clearly been liberating and productive for Hickey as a writer: it enabled a rare generosity of vision and therefore was valuable even if it couldn’t exactly be justified. It was to Hickey’s credit, wrote Nehamas, that he stood up for the common man in his feeling that many critics, curators, and institutions could over-cerebrate the experience of looking at and making art. But it was simply wrong to say, as Hickey sometimes did, that appreciating art should be easy. Some art reveals its beauty after further study and exposure. Some tastes take time and attention to acquire and can

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repay that patience in spades. Even the distinction between easy and difficult art was much less clear than it seemed. Much of the popular art that the common viewer found “easy” depended, for its apparently smooth absorption, on our thoroughgoing assimilation of sophisticated aesthetic vocabularies. This was why the broad public could so fluently consume, differentiate, and interpret the highly stylized visual symbolism of advertising, the technical jargon of professional sports, the narrative complexity of prestige television, and the subtle variations in the chord structures of pop music. In this, as in so much else, Nehamas found even Hickey’s contradictions illuminating. He was wonderfully attentive to the ways that popular art could be complex and yet too quick to disparage “difficult” modernist art. “Some difficult works may just be—difficult,” wrote Nehamas. “That does not by itself make them ugly. My suspicion is that if Hickey can find beauty both in Walt Disney and in Pontormo, if he ‘cannot imagine a reason for categorizing any part of our involuntary, ordinary experience as “unaesthetic,”’ if he can hear the eighth-notes of a pop group in the pneumatic slap of a jackhammer in the middle of a New York street, then he hates the high-minded rhetoric and forbidding institutions of Modernism more than he hates modernist art itself.”21 Perhaps the most serious allegation that Nehamas lobbed against Hickey was that in the end he wanted just as badly as everyone else to justify beauty by principles or values external to it. That in triangulating between leftists like Amelia Jones, who believed that beauty was too often an agent of injustice, and humanists like Elaine Scarry, who saw beauty as an agent of justice, Hickey failed to challenge their shared premise that it had to be an agent of something other than itself at all.22 This failure of nerve, for Nehamas, was the crossroads where many of Hickey’s individual conceptual errors met. Hickey developed a quantitative theory of beauty, that the most beautiful thing was that which

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Marxism and Art: Beware of Fascist Feminism. 1977. Hannah Wilke. Offset lithograph. 111/4 × 83/4 in.

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enfranchised the most people, because he wanted to link beauty to democracy. He was too hard on modernist art because it was so self-consciously inaccessible to the masses. The subterranean purpose of the final and strangest essay in The Invisible Dragon, which binds sado-masochistic sexual play to the founding concepts of American democracy, was to enable Hickey to square the circle between his small d democratic commitments and the abstruse French theorists he cherished. For all its virtuosity, however, this many-layered justification of beauty by democracy was, for Nehamas, ultimately unpersuasive. It turned our eyes away from the real reason to value beauty even if, or precisely because, we can’t justify it. Like life, beauty was that which cannot be justified but must be pursued anyway. It was a beautiful man on the street, so striking in his angles and chiseled power that we stop and stare. It was the shuddering force of an Emily Dickinson line, a wry verse from Willie Nelson, or a luminously shrouded gaze from Rembrandt. Such beauty, for Nehamas, was analogous to, and often coterminous with, that which drew us to other people for love or friendship. Not what was virtuous in them but what promised something enticing and enlarging that we couldn’t yet grasp. “I willingly give you power over myself,” Nehamas wrote, “emotionally, ethically, and intellectually, trusting you not to exploit it. By becoming vulnerable in that way, I put my identity at serious risk because I have no way of telling how our relationship will ultimately affect me and whether it will be for good or bad.”23 By the time Nehamas published Only a Promise of Happiness in 2007, Hickey had receded as a foil. The beauty wars were over and with them, the cultural space in which he was a necessary reference point. Hickey also hadn’t published much of substance in the decade since Air Guitar. He had voluntarily, or self-sabotagingly, absented himself from the fray.

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Nehamas turned to more obvious sparring partners, like Plato, Kant, and Schopenhauer, for a book that aimed to overhaul a few millennia of philosophical tradition. Hickey showed up in the book, though, at a few pivotal moments. It was Hickey’s account of his youthful love affair with the fiction of Gustave Flaubert, from an essay in Air Guitar, that provided the language Nehamas used to characterize his own understanding of how desire and beauty were bound together and of how “art that speaks to our desire” moves us to do work in the world. Such work pushes us toward conversation and argumentation with others who might share or reject our affinities, generating in the wake of such conversations new social alignments and distinctions.24 Later in the book, Nehamas wrestled with Hickey’s affection for Norman Rockwell. He wasn’t persuaded by Hickey; Rockwell remained inert to him. But he found in Hickey’s writing about Rockwell evidence of a “consistent sensibility,” an admirable willingness to look closely and generously at art and artists whose mass popularity had often led to critical rejection or disregard. Hickey was wrong about Rockwell, Nehamas believed, but a misjudgment in a given case didn’t invalidate the quality of the sensibility or the value of continued engagement with it.25 And such a sensibility, for Nehamas, was a constituent part of what it meant to have a real “style,” a broader concept that had been an abiding preoccupation of his for much of his career, going back to his first book, Nietzsche: Life as Literature. “One thing is needful,” Nietzsche had said: “To ‘give style’ to one’s character.” To have a style, in this sense, was to demonstrate through the practice of your life that everything that you are and do is a manifestation of who you have struggled to become through choice, practice, distinction, refinement, and honest reckoning with your strengths and weaknesses and particularities. A meaningful, hard-won style can

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incorporate behavior that is ethical or moral, but unlike ethics and morality, which aspire to universality, style is intrinsically individual. It is real only insofar as it is distinguishable. What is universal can be good, but it can’t be stylish. Of course, no one achieved such style in all things, but true style did occasionally appear in the world, and when you encountered it in a person or performance, the question of agreement tended to give way to admiration.26 Also interpretation. Toward the end of Only a Promise of Happiness, Nehamas returned to Nietzsche to work through some of the ways that beauty didn’t just demand interpretation but also in important respects was defined by it. To find something beautiful was to recognize it as distinct from all other things one has seen before and then immediately to be compelled enough by that difference to seek to understand it. This desire to interpret was the engine of our ongoing encounter with the beautiful. It was what moved us forward in time, seeking to perceive more, connecting us outward to other things and people, and generating new questions of the beautiful and therefore further need to interpret. The encounter ended, if it did, when all our questions were answered sufficiently. At that point, we no longer would find the thing or person beautiful. It or he or she would be exhausted of meaning for us, and the interpretive dance would be over. Whether this encounter was brief or lifelong, however, it was not just our interpretation that evolved over time, it was us, too. We became different people, gazing on the world with new eyes. What kind of people we became as a result of this engagement with the beautiful, however, depended not just on the beautiful that was changing us but on our own capacity to integrate our evolving perspective into a coherent and interesting way of seeing and being. It depended on our own style. This was the case for Nehamas for any mode of life and seeing, but it was overtly true for the practice of criticism. It was one

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Untitled (Helen Hickey’s suitcase). Nic Nicosia.

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of the reasons why he was so drawn to philosophers like Foucault and Nietzsche, who were brilliant and creative students of art and literature, as well as to the work of belletrists like Oscar Wilde and Dave Hickey. To see beautifully can become an ongoing act of beauty in its own right. “Beautiful people are not those who just look good,” wrote Nehamas, “and beautiful things are not created only by artists. They don’t even have to be particular, distinct artifacts—they can be simply those ways of seeing the things and people we love that manifest our character and style. And sometimes, if the range of things we find beautiful and what we find beautiful in them are connected with each other in the right ways, we may become beautiful in our own right: we will provoke others to love and want to come to know us for themselves, starting the cycle over again.”27 Late in my own relationship with Hickey, it occurred to me to ask him what he thought of Amelia Jones and Alexander Nehamas. He didn’t have much to say about either. He had crossed paths with Nehamas a few times when they were both writing about beauty and would end up on the same panels or at the same conference. He didn’t think he had ever met Jones. “Did you see the exhibit?” I asked him. “No,” he said. “I never saw it.”28 It was startling to hear, though it shouldn’t have been. When Jones’s staging of The Dinner Party was up at the Hammer, Hickey couldn’t have known that it would ever play any role in the ongoing conversation about his own reputation. He wasn’t even living in Los Angeles at the time. What he knew of it came through the criticism of his friend Christopher Knight and his wife Libby Lumpkin. The safe money is that had he seen it, he wouldn’t have liked it for the same reasons Knight and Lumpkin didn’t. Too much wall text. Too didactic a reading of the art. Too indiscriminate in its selection of art

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and artists. And, of course, the context. Jones was right: there was a war of sorts going on in the art world in the 1990s. Hickey hadn’t entered the lists on that particular day, but it’s hard to imagine him failing to line up with his comrades-in-arms. I do wonder, though. I didn’t see Sexual Politics. All I have is the catalogue, which is an imperfect reflection of the exhibition. But it’s such an exuberant book. There is so much joy and liberation in it, such a sense of artists taking ownership of themes and images that for so long had been either wholly unrepresented in the tradition or represented by men. The words are there, and they’re dryer than they probably should be, but what bursts from the page are the vaginas, the menstrual blood, the flesh and fur and fabrics, the blunt words, and fake dicks. Even in those images that deal with assault and abuse, oppression and demeaning representation, there is a defiance and pride of ownership. I find it moving. Is it possible that Hickey would have seen past the wall text and been moved as well? I don’t know. I don’t want to impose my tastes on his. He has his preferences and blind spots. But this much is true. There is little in Hickey, read honestly, that would turn one away from work like this, and so much that encourages not just a generosity of vision, but also permission to disagree with him and then to use him in service of disagreement with him. The goal isn’t to line up behind him, or imitate him, but to care passionately and intelligently, and with style.

I would like to discuss two cities in which a single dream predominates—two of the most successful desert enterprises since Persepolis— at once resorts and last resorts: Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Las Vegas, Nevada. Dave Hickey, “Dialectical Utopias,” Harvard Design Magazine, 1998

In summer 2010, after nearly twenty years living and working in Las Vegas, Dave Hickey and Libby Lumpkin were exiled from home. Libby had recently resigned as executive director of the Las Vegas Art Museum and accepted a position at the University of New Mexico. Dave was tenured at UNLV and could have stayed on longer, commuting back and forth from Nevada to New Mexico, but he was seventy-two, increasingly dependent on his wife, increasingly disliked at UNLV, and not so interested in teaching anymore.

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At the peak of Dave’s Vegas romance, the city had done a great deal of symbolic and rhetorical work for him. It was an ostentatiously visual, vulgar culture, which provided his students at UNLV both a surfeit of stimulus and a blessed deficit of critical baggage. It was a nonjudgmental, pleasure-accepting haven from the puritanism of the East. And it was a rich font of metaphors, quips, and anecdotes to deploy in the service of the series of critiques of the American art world that had made his name in the 1990s. “America,” he wrote in Air Guitar, “is a very poor lens through which to view Las Vegas, while Las Vegas is a wonderful lens through which to view America. What is hidden elsewhere exists here in quotidian visibility. “So when you fly out of Las Vegas to, say, Milwaukee, the absences imposed by repression are like holes in your vision. . . . Moreover, since I must regularly venture out of Vegas onto the bleak savannas of high culture, and there, like an aging gigolo, generate bodily responses to increasingly abject objects of desire, there is nothing quite as bracing as the prospect of flying home, of swooping down into that ardent explosion of lights in the heart of the pitch-black desert—of coming home to the only indigenous visual culture on the North American continent, a town bereft of dead white walls, gray wool carpets, ficus plants, and Barcelona chairs—where there is everything to see and not a single pretentious object demanding to be scrutinized.”1 Dave had dined on, and in, Las Vegas for what were unquestionably the best years of his life. He had done most of his best writing there. He had brought into being around him a community of student artists who had done good work under his idiosyncratic tutelage, and who had come to love him in the way he most easily let himself be loved, which was at a slight distance. He and Libby had genuinely influenced the art and culture of the city. And he had had health insurance. By the time they left, however, the scene had dissipated, for a variety of reasons, and

Vegas Apocalypse: Mouth of Hell. 1998. Jeffrey Vallance. Graphite on paper. 24 × 30 in.

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it was a less wrenching transition than it might have been a few years earlier, though still not a happy one. After renting a place near campus in Albuquerque for two years, he and Libby sold a few of their more valuable paintings and used the money to buy a three-bedroom split-level in Santa Fe. The plan was to supplement their lives in Santa Fe, which they expected to be boring, with frequent travel. Dave’s cachet in the art world had diminished from its peak in the mid-2000s, when he won his MacArthur Foundation award, but the invitations to speak, write, and teach still came. There was every reason to believe that he and Libby could use Santa Fe as a base from which to proceed in their cosmopolitan lives. Then in 2014, while in Miami, he collapsed from a ruptured aortic aneurysm, and the plan faltered. By the time I met Dave in person in 2019, Santa Fe had become something of a prison for him, somewhere you went, he had once written, “for some fake good food, terrible art, rich people, and adobe huts with rounded corners that look like Flintstone SUVs.”2 The description, from a late essay of his called “My Silk Road,” was affectionate, but its warmth was premised on the city playing a very minor role in Hickey’s life. Santa Fe was meant to be a brief squiggle of kitsch along his Silk Road through the desert plains of Nevada, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, a route he would occasionally travel both for professional reasons, to see far-flung art and artists, and to enact a kind of purification ritual, a refreshing of the psychological equilibrium between the vast, uncaring alienness of the West and the achievements and frivolities of human civilization. “You drive through a palpable atmosphere,” he wrote, “since the desert reflects light back upward to illuminate the particulate atmosphere of dust, and so the atmosphere is lighted from above and below and comes to life as positive, dimensional emptiness. The same thing happens when

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you’re surfing, but driving isn’t surfing. I have always done this ride for communion with the original Silk Road, to touch the filigree of pathways taken by those voracious adventurers through vast stretches of wretched nothingness punctuated by oases and dazzling attractions.”3 The essay is an ode both to home and to the freedom to leave it. Now Dave was tethered—tragically, comically—to a city that he had more than once used in his writing as an illustrative contrast to his spirit home of Las Vegas.4 He couldn’t fly without risking another aortic rupture. Within Santa Fe, he had nowhere worth going nor the physical capacity to go there. A lifetime of unhealthy living, capped off by the aneurysm, had left him unable to walk unassisted for more than a minute or two. Driving was out of the question. He had only left the general area a few times in the previous five years and had had to be chauffeured by friends or former graduate students. Mostly, he sat at home, in a house still largely unpacked from their move years before, watching MSNBC and Law & Order, smoking, drinking Starbucks, occasionally writing, and calling friends. I had become one of those friends, though one whose face he had only seen once when he accidentally pressed the video instead of audio call button on his smartphone. A year or so earlier, Dave and I had been introduced via email by a mutual friend, and we had taken to each other, or at least taken to what we could give each other, which is often the same thing. Dave was lonely and feeling unappreciated. I was offering to write a book about how amazing he was. I had loved some version of him for nearly twenty years, ever since my older brother told me I really needed to read this book Air Guitar by this guy Dave Hickey, that it would blow my mind. I had bought the book and it had. It had also—and this was why I was in Santa Fe two decades later—given me a kind of gift, one I’m still reckoning with as I write these words.

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“He treated you like you were supposed to get out there and do something,” Dave once wrote of his old theater professor Walther Volbach, who had landed at Texas Christian University after fleeing the Nazis. “He told me I was a callow redneck with all the spirituality of a toiletseat—that I could possibly cure the former but would probably have to live with the latter—but that was great! Nobody had ever told me I was anything before, so I took it to heart.”5 Dave on the page is a gentler presence than Herr Volbach, but he had done for me, as a young would-be writer, something like what Volbach did for him. He had deflated me and liberated me. Nobody cared whether I dedicated myself to writing. It was a selfish, superfluous thing to do, and one that deserved no presumption of virtue. If done right, however, it could be wonderful and world-shaking. Dave also revealed to me the real enemies of such an endeavor: the “aryan muscle-boys” who would bend art to serve their stern, humorless deities. “So all the muscle-boy artists and writers,” he wrote, paraphrasing Volbach, “they will become professors and the darlings of professors, and they will teach the young to revere their pure, muscle-boy art, because it is good for them, and they will teach women and Jews and queers to make this muscle-boy art, too. And it will be very pure, because they are muscle-boys and they don’t have to please anyone. So there will be no cabaret, no pictures, no fantasy or flashing lights, no filth or sexy talk, no cruelty, no melodies, no laughter, no Max Reinhardt, no Ur-Faust, no A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And nobody will love it.”6 In Dave’s cosmology, the aryan muscle-boys weren’t just actual aryan muscle-boys; they were all the puritans and schoolmarms, of whatever faith, color, ideology, and affiliation, who think art isn’t just subordinate to ethics but a practical branch of it. The descendants of the aryan muscle-boys who made Walther Volbach leave the dynamism and glories of Weimar Germany for the Wonder Bread wasteland of Fort

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Worth weren’t just uptight political conservatives. They were politically correct professors and curators, well-meaning activists and art teachers, right-thinking bureaucrats and philanthropists. They were my father Tim Oppenheimer, whose own ancestors left Germany in the mid-nineteenth century, bringing with them to Pittsburgh a very Hochdeutsch ethos of industry, virtue, and austerity. That ethos had transmitted itself down to my dad, had been filtered through his leftwing politics, and ultimately had enmeshed itself in my nervous system, where I experienced it as a quarreling clan of psychologically crippling ideas about the obligations of the good life, the uncouthness of striving, the frivolity of pleasure, and the superiority of northern European aesthetics. That is too grandiose. Like Dave, my father was raised by wolves, though in my dad’s case, they were narcissistic upper-class German Jews rather than artsy, narcissistic, middle-class Texans. He has struggled, my dad, to figure out what to do with what he was given and far too often not given. He and my mother, who has her own kinked history of communist-inflected Jewish-puritan ethics, were (maybe) good enough parents. I’m imposing too simple a schema on a complex history. But what I do remember clearly is that my father modeled a style of virtuous self-abnegation that too easily slid into self-sabotage and that his left-wing politics were both genuine and a convenient veil for certain pathologies. To strive for oneself, too nakedly, was to buy into capitalistic values. To reach out to others to advance one’s own interests was to use them as means rather than to treat them as ends in themselves. To seek pleasure was okay in moderation but could too easily descend into indulgence. Our home was a visual and textural instantiation of these values: hardwoods and off-whites, shabby chic furniture and throw blankets in natural fibers, tastefully framed art in monochrome or low-contrast colors. A friend once called it “Jewish minimalism.”

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This was my inheritance, against which I struggled very inarticulately and mostly unconsciously. Until I read Dave. He didn’t sever me from my inheritance. For good and ill, I remain my father’s son, guided and tortured by the call of the good. But he offered a profoundly different perspective on it, reclassifying what had always seemed virtue as vice, investing with dignity what we had treated as ancillary, and casting into vivid relief the frailty, forgiveness, and permission that too often were missing from our family system. Much of what Dave taught me had to do with the sympathy and intelligence he applied to varieties of experience that were alien to me and that I might otherwise have dismissed as too low to take seriously: the flatland of Las Vegas low rollers, the Austin and Nashville of outlaw country singers, the Catholic baroque of Los Angeles lowrider detailers. Just as powerful, though, were the ways in which he turned a skeptical sociological eye on some of the worlds I knew quite well: academia, the Northeast corridor, the moral-aesthetic universe of the educated cultural elite. “I suspect that my unhappy colleagues,” he once wrote of his fellow professors at UNLV, “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’), and being a professore in this environment doesn’t feel nearly as special as it might in Cambridge or Bloomington, simply because the rich (the traditional clients of the professore class) are not special in Las Vegas, because money here is just money. You can make a lot of it here, but there are no socially sanctioned forms of status to ennoble one’s having made it—nor any predetermined socio-cultural agendas that one might pursue as a consequence of having been so ennobled. Membership in the University Club will not get you comped at Caesars, unless you play baccarat.”7

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What caught me in Dave’s writing—and holds me still—lies in the dance between these two poles. On the one hand, a haute-populist critique that allowed me to detach from some of the more superficial norms and expectations of my people without giving up on the passion for high ideas and art. On the other hand, a deep generosity of spirit, a recognition that, though we are all fallen, mangy creatures, we have inside us the promise of something beautiful. When Dave was in his glory, I’ve been told, his brilliance poured out of him in a glittering stream of connections, allusions, humor, sophistication, and vulgarity. He was that enthusiastic young Texan who had been shocked awake by Herr Professor Volbach, but he was also a fleshy old aesthete on the other side of decades of learning and experiencing, full up with stories about partying with Warhol at the Factory, reading Foucault at the Dairy Queen, and shooting the shit with Lou Reed in Akron. When he was on, hanging with him was an aesthetic experience in its own right. Dave at eighty is still charming, but he’s been in poor health for many years and has lost some of his physical and mental vigor. By the time I arrived in Santa Fe, with my wife and two sons, I knew this about him. Even so, it was surprising to see what rough shape he was in physically. When planning the visit over the phone, I raised the possibility of visiting some galleries or museums in town with him. I wanted the set piece of looking at art with Dave Hickey, of course, but I also just wanted to look at art with Dave because he has seen things in the visual world that no one else has seen, and he has converted those perceptions into some of the most brilliantly and beautifully arresting prose of the last few decades. I wanted a taste of that. Dave agreed we would play it by ear. As we walked from the street outside through the hotel lobby and into the restaurant, however, it was clear that no stroll into the city was feasible. He had to stop two or three

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Professor Walther Volbach.

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times before we made it to the table, leaning against railings or chairs to rest. By the time we sat down, he was exhausted. He was a broken-down old lion of a man, bigger than I had anticipated from only having seen pictures of him. His distended heart wasn’t sending out oxygen efficiently enough to keep his mass going for long. He managed, though, and over the three days I was in Santa Fe, we got on. It helped that while the trip was to see Dave, it was also a trip for my nine-year-old son, Asa. His older sister had gone to Disney World the previous year, and we owed him a trip of his own. Santa Fe wasn’t what Asa would have chosen if it had been up to him, but we were leaving his sister behind, so that was good, and he is a sweet and vulnerable person—so sweet and vulnerable that I’m pained all the time by the ways in which I fail him. He was eager to collaborate in making the trip special. The family trip, which I had feared would compete with the pilgrimage to see Dave, ended up complementing it. It felt like we were in town to visit a favorite aunt and uncle. They wanted to see us. I wanted to see them and to show off my family. We didn’t need to spend the whole time together. It helped, too, that I knew why I was there, which wasn’t to plumb Dave’s depths but rather to inspect his surfaces. To see how he walked and how he dressed. To understand how he inhabited space and furnished his house. To get to know Libby better and get a glimpse into their relationship. To see him smoke his cigarettes and order food from Burger King. And maybe, and this is slightly embarrassing, to detach myself just an inch or two more from the influence he had over me, to see up close the human being so that I could better take the measure of the writer. I was also there to see Dave in person before he died. Because I knew that if I didn’t, I would regret it.

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Toward the end of the 1980s, something happened to Dave, or a few somethings happened. After a love affair with drugs, he finally quit using (more or less). His girlfriend Susan, after years of putting up with his shenanigans, ended things. He and Libby found each other. He was hired as a visiting professor at UNLV and then promoted to the tenure track. He found some good editors. He found some good enemies. And he burst forth artistically. The key relationship in his artistic development was with Gary Kornblau, an LA-based writer, editor, teacher, and impresario. In 1989, Kornblau founded Art issues, and at the suggestion of mutual friend Christopher Knight, he gave Hickey a call. Kornblau and Hickey ended up talking for hours. Then they talked for hours the next day, and the next, and so on for the next ten years. Their relationship, almost entirely carried out by phone, became the beating heart of the magazine and of the critical and artistic community that coalesced around it. The first product of this communion, published in the November 1990 issue, was “Lost Boys: Siegfried and Roy at the Mirage,” a profile of the flamboyant illusionistic duo and a meditation on what happens in Vegas, why it is so routinely misunderstood by critics, and what it has to tell us about the role of art and commerce in democracy. In retrospect, it wasn’t the best essay Dave would write over the next decade: some of the writerly tics he had acquired in the sixties and seventies, when he was emulating Tom Wolfe and other New Journalists, hadn’t quite been ironed out. But the essay got the basic balance of intellectual and stylistic humors right. It lays out many of the critical and philosophical bullet points on which Hickey would expand over the intervening years: Too many of our cultural arbiters are captured by a moralistic muscle-boy ideology the political consequences of which they dangerously misconstrue. We have too often overlooked and underestimated the demotic visual languages of places like Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and

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Nashville because their relationship to money and commerce is constructively tense rather than alienated and hostile. Popular culture plays an incredibly complex role in knitting together and perpetually reincarnating American democracy. It defies not just the old high-low binaries but also more contemporary efforts to ascribe subversive intent to subcultural activity that is fundamentally pleasure-seeking and social. Also present in “Lost Boys” were long passages in Hickey’s mature style, which finally knew what to do with his folksiness, his highfalutin’ aestheticism and intellectualism, and his intensely personal relationship to art and artists. In the past, he had dealt with these tendencies by exoticizing them, ironizing them, sometimes even separating them out from the main authorial voice and personifying them. By the Siegfried and Roy piece, he had finally taken possession of them, weaving them into a sinuous, mid-temperature prose that grounded itself in humor but was capable of strategically lifting off into gorgeous flights of lyricism. “We sat beside a long window-wall that looked out on the interior of their Mission-Moroccan compound,” he wrote of meeting Siegfried and Roy. “There, in dappled sunlight, snow-white tigers drifted like smoke across the perfect green lawn, cruising among white plaster effigies of themselves beneath swooping coconut palms, which were themselves echoed, here and there, by swooping, white aluminum versions of themselves, whited-out palms, like tropical ghosts. The backdrop for this scene was a long, white, tiger grotto full of bright, blue water with two fountains bubbling and a substantial waterfall that was controlled by a rheostat, located on the wall. (‘Watch!’ Roy says, as he turns the dial, ‘I stop the flood!’) “The ‘boys’—as everybody in Las Vegas calls them, although they are now in their early fifties—exude the same elusive blend of fact and fiction. Siegfried, the blonde one, is the more diffident, the steady one. In postwar Hollywood, his air of ironic, damaged innocence would

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Illusionists Siegfried and Roy and friends onstage at the Mirage Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada, just months prior to Roy Horn’s career-disabling mauling by a white tiger in 2003. Carol Highsmith.

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have gotten him cast as a sympathetic U-boat commander. Roy, on the other hand, with his Eurasian cheekbones and fop-rock hairdo, is more exotic—the glamour puss of the team—a perpetual font of effervescent Germano-Vegas hyperbole. They are ‘showbiz’ to their toes, in other words, but I couldn’t help liking them, nor avoid feeling about them (as Fred Allen did about Hollywood) that beneath all that phony tinsel, there is real tinsel.”8 By 1993, when Art issues Press published The Invisible Dragon, Kornblau was already in the process of enticing, bullying, manipulating, and coaxing Hickey into writing the series of essays that in 1997 would result in Air Guitar. Both books landed like bunker-busting bombs in the art world, establishing Hickey as such a figure in that world, loved and loathed in roughly equal measure, that his fame and influence percolated beyond its borders in a way not seen since the heyday of Clement Greenberg. When Kornblau shuttered the magazine in 2001, it was in no small part because Hickey had detached himself from it. Hickey had gotten so big that the glossy magazines and brand-name museums and galleries were paying or flattering him to a degree Art issues simply couldn’t match. The two men remained friends, but the editorial relationship was over. When I asked Kornblau what it was that he did for Hickey, who never before and never again wrote at that pitch of intensity and beauty, his answer was surprisingly simple. “Dave aims to please,” he said. “He’d always written for other people, and to what he imagined their expectations were. I made it clear to him that pleasing me meant writing for himself.”9 It was more complicated than that. Gary and Dave had views on art and the art world that overlapped and conflicted in constructive ways. Kornblau had that intuitive sense of a writer’s psychology that exceptional editors tend to have—when to push and when to hold back, when

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to nurture and when to discipline. And Kornblau had his motives, too. He recognized from early on that if he played his cards and his man right, he might midwife something extraordinary into the world, that playing the stern but benevolent father to Dave’s genius might be his own ticket to lasting significance. This gave him a patience with Dave, who could be totally infuriating, that otherwise would be inexplicable. When Air Guitar came out, it was a vindication of Kornblau’s patience as well as of his conviction that Dave was, in fact, the world-class talent that he had only before hinted at becoming, that at his best almost everything he had to say, about whatever he wanted to say, was gorgeous and insightful and complicated and down-to-earth in just the right proportions. This included a revised version of the Siegfried and Roy essay, as well as pieces on jazz musician Chet Baker, beauty, psychedelics, Las Vegas, Perry Mason, basketball, rock and roll, Norman Rockwell, the art market, his childhood, Liberace, Robert Mitchum, Michelangelo, Hank Williams, Gustave Flaubert, the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, the National Endowment for the Arts, film noir, and Donald Duck, among other subjects. If there is a theoretical locus in Air Guitar, it is Dave’s short essay on Flaubert’s “A Simple Heart.” In Dave’s hands, the story becomes a kind of manifesto for how art at its best can bind people together in sympathetic orientation around the work they love. It is also a reproach to how art people, at their worst, can destroy and demean that organic activity in favor of institutional commitments that privilege virtue over beauty. “Set in the early years of the nineteenth century,” he wrote, “in the bleak, provincial milieu around Pont-l’Évêque and Trouville (only a few miles from Flaubert’s home at Croisset), ‘A Simple Heart’ tells the story of Félicité, an isolated, illiterate, Catholic house-servant; it narrates her life from birth to death as a poised, sotto voce litany of labor and loss,

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of emotional neglect and wasted time that dissolves, suddenly, in the last sentence of the story, into this dazzling image of mercy—a vision of grace as gaudy and permissive as a Tiepolo ceiling. “Eighty years after Flaubert finished writing ‘A Simple Heart’ in provincial France, I finished reading it in provincial Texas, sitting in the wooden swing on the shady porch of my grandparents’ house in south Fort Worth, and, having finished it, Flaubert’s story, which had transported me out of the present, delivered me back into it with sharpened awareness. I can still remember the hard angle of the morning light and the smell of cottonseed in the lazy air as I sat there on the swing with my forearms on my knees and Trois Contes between my hands, amazed that writing could do what it had just done.”10 In some respects, the essay was a reiteration of critiques Hickey had made before, going back to well before Invisible Dragon, about how the institutional art world wielded its power to assert dominance over what was wild and seductive and subversive in art. What gave the essay its power, though, was not its critique but its earnestness and vulnerability. It both made a case for love and was an enactment of it. Like the Flaubert story on which it was riffing, it wasn’t a call to arms but to connection. It was a vision of what art could do in the world: how it could bring into existence small coteries of people who put themselves on the line for objects they found persuasive and pleasure-inducing. “Thus, when I finished reading ‘A Simple Heart’ that morning in Texas,” Dave wrote. “I did not retire to my couch to savor the experience. Nor did I pick up the copy of Bouvard and Pécuchet that lay on the corner of my desk with its pages still uncut. Nor did I start making notes for my own story in the manner of ‘A Simple Heart.’ I started calling my friends. I wanted them to read the story immediately, so we could talk about it.”11

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In my last few hours alone with Dave and Libby, on Saturday afternoon, we just hung out at their house, mostly in the kitchen. While they smoked cigarettes and I drank Diet Coke, we talked over the hum of MSNBC in the background. We compared notes on TV shows we liked in common and commiserated about Trump. Libby apologized for the state of their house, which was overrun by still-crated art and boxed-up books. Dave showed me some photos from the essay he was writing about Michael Heizer’s epic land art installation, City. Dave first wrote about Heizer back in 1971, in his seminal essay on land art. The following year Heizer began work on City, which he is only just finishing up now. That’s a lot of weight for Dave’s essay to carry, and he was struggling with it. I asked him how he gets into it. “I kind of just locate the piece,” he said. “I just say: ‘There is a city in the middle of Nevada, due north of Las Vegas, due east of San Francisco, nestled in the downward track of the continental divide.’ And I go on from there.”12 Listening now to the audio of that afternoon, I am struck by the disparity between how simple and homey it felt and how bonkers the raw data of about half of our conversation was. I talked about my family and work. Dave talked about friends of his who had died, another who was sick with early onset Alzheimer’s. We listened for a while to the news about the Mueller report and the latest Trump attorney who had resigned from the administration. I showed Dave an article on my phone about Gajin Fujita, a former student at UNLV whose art had just been featured on a new library card from the LA public library. Fujita credits Dave for setting him free (“he said great art should violate people’s expectations and honestly, that’s all I’ve been trying to do”13). The ticker at the bottom of the TV mentioned the previous night’s mass shooting in Virginia Beach, and Dave said that he had briefly been worried for an old friend of his who had been on vacation there. His friend was fine, and

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our talk drifted to the subject of mass shootings in general. “I lived through the daddy-figure shooting phase,” he said. “The Kennedys and Martin Luther King. George Wallace and Andy Warhol. This is worse. They’re just shooting regular people. I don’t understand. I really don’t understand, know what I mean? It transcends my ability to get it.” Dave talked about being in Las Vegas in 2017 when a man firing from a thirty-second floor window of the Mandalay Bay Hotel killed fifty-eight people at a country music concert below. It was the single worst mass shooting in American history. Dave was in town to give some lectures at UNLV, in the hopes of rekindling his affiliation with them, and was staying in an adjacent hotel. “I heard it and then I saw it,” he said. “I went downstairs, and in the lobby there were these two teenage guys covered in blood. Their clothes were soaked. That bright red, just pitched-out blood. They weren’t hurt. They had been helping people, and all they wanted was a towel to wipe the blood off, and the fucking Central European guy running the hotel wouldn’t give it to them, and so I went and got them some towels. “After it stopped or seemed to have stopped, we walked over to the site of the shooting, and it was weird—if you were writing a novel, you would want this detail—the field of the concert looked like glowing coals. Glow, glow, glow. It was everybody’s cell phone. Isn’t that sad? Everybody’s trying to call home and say, I’m being shot at. And everybody at home is calling to say, Were you dead? And they were dead.” There is grief in Dave’s voice as he says this, dignified rather than cheapened by the artistry of his language in conveying it. It’s a reminder that even at eighty, even reduced, he knows what to do with words. The descriptive efficiency and efficacy of the “just pitched-out blood.” The glow, glow, glow. The subjunctive tenseplay (“Were you dead?” they asked).14

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Dave once said to me that “depth is a German fantasy.” I’ve spent a lot of time since then trying to understand what he meant by that. If there is a deep story of Dave, it encompasses his father’s suicide, his mother’s emotional neglect, his siblings’ struggles with alcoholism, his divorce, professional failure, drug addiction, money troubles, physical ailments, social anxiety, chronic insecurity, depression. It’s a story of seeking ecstatic, communal, and other kinds of pleasure against a backdrop of pain, dislocation, and failure. Dave dips into this deep story now and then in his essays; much of his best writing functions in complex relation to it. But he does less work than any writer I’ve ever known welding the individual ingots together into a larger arc of himself, not even a self-serving arc. He can do depth, but he doesn’t live by it, and he rejects the implied hierarchy of the metaphor. The German Mistake, for Dave, is to assume that what’s beneath is truer or richer than what’s on the surface. It’s just in a different location. If anything, if we’re asking what is more essential to the grand task of living together in a complex, pluralistic society, it is precisely what’s on the surface, available for public perception, celebration, attachment, and disputation, where we have to start. I think Dave has been in pain his whole life. One could assign content to that feeling, but pain, shame, and guilt of the sort Dave harbors don’t assume delineated form without years of the type of introspection that Dave hasn’t done and never will. To impose that psychodynamic structure on him, dredging up and patching together rosebuds from the depths, would be to concretize what is in fact amorphous. It would also be to miss what’s most important in what Dave has done as a writer, which is propose some answers to how we each can respond to our own struggle. “We are all guilty,” he once wrote. “Innocence is the object of wonder, the grail of our endeavors.”15 Such innocence, for Dave, isn’t a denial of history or politics or guilt or pain. It is consolation for it and, once in a while, redemption from

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it. It is a gift that art can give, both in the form of the individual’s interior encounter with the work and through his or her social sharing and then re-generation of it with others. It is the exquisitely achieved innocence not of Félicité herself, but of Loulou, the irascible parrot she loves and, when Loulou dies, stuffs and turns into an idol, worshipping her “as an embodiment of her loss and desire . . . all those things she never knew she might deserve.” The innocence that we should seek, for Dave, is Flaubert’s creation of the world of “Un Coeur Simple” and then also of the community that comes into existence around it, a community that extends through time and spins off other works that then have the potential to generate new communities around them. “Flaubert,” Dave writes, “was concerned most critically with socializing his parrot, with offering it up to us in public, not as an act of vanity or seduction, but as an emblem of what works of art might do in the world—how they might redeem isolation like Félicité’s by creating about them a confluence of simple hearts, a community united not in what they are but in the collective mystery of what they are not and now find embodied before them. “What Flaubert proposes .  .  . is just democracy: a society of the imperfect and incomplete, whose citizens routinely discuss, disdain, hire, vote for and invest in a wide variety of parrots to represent their desires in various fields of discourse—who elect the representatives of their desire and occasionally re-elect them. Thus, unconcerned with class, culture, and identity, this society is perpetually created and re-created in non-exclusive, overlapping communities of desire that organize themselves around a multiplicity of gorgeous parrots.”16 While I was sitting with Dave and Libby in the kitchen, he got a call from Julia Friedman, a critic and art historian who had befriended him a few years back and ended up editing two collections of epigrammatic writing that he had done on Facebook. I could hear enough of her end

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Dave Hickey. Toby Kamps.

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of the call to recognize the rhythm of the conversation, which sounded a great deal like me talking to Dave. She told him about her life, about what she and her beau Tim Bavington, an artist she had met through Dave, were up to, about mutual friends and former students and colleagues. She asked if it was okay if she and Tim came to visit in a few months. Dave said enough in response to give her room to keep talking for five or ten minutes, at the end of which she promised to coordinate with Libby on a visit and said good-bye. Listening to them eased some of the concern I had that she would see me as a rival for Dave’s favor. There was something about the quality of their talk that was neither possessive nor entreating. Dave was not her symbolic father. He wasn’t mine either, and she and I weren’t rival children. What was going on began with but wasn’t bounded by him. He was our uncle, our bandmate, our friend, our coach, and our confessor. Being around him, and in relation to him and his writing, made us feel better, affirmed the validity and meaning of our shared project. Let us know we were okay. “We must eat and drink together, then,” Dave wrote, “and discuss the events of the day, however disastrous, in order to continue.”17 In August 2001, I drove across country with my oldest friend Jason. We started in our hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts, and then headed west to Berkeley, California. The plan was to make the trip fairly quickly, lingering only in those places where we knew someone and otherwise just stopping for sleep and food. At my insistence, we made an exception for SITE Santa Fe, which was hosting a biennial exhibition curated by Dave Hickey. I don’t remember much of Beau Monde: Toward a Redeemed Cosmopolitanism. Dave’s writing was the draw, and I had neither the background nor the sensitivity to perceive what was interesting about how

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he was arranging art and artists in conversation with each other. As I leaf through the catalogue now, the only distinct visual memory it evokes is of Jim Isermann’s installation on the facade of the museum and of his two hedges of plastic sunflowers that guided visitors inside. The gift shop was selling surplus sunflowers, and I bought two. I remember also, in a general way, that it was the sort of exhibition you would expect Dave Hickey to curate—smooth and bright and light—and that in that way, it was of a piece with the whole drive, which was characterized by a distinct feeling that at that precise moment in time in America, at the tail end of the long 1990s, history and politics lay lightly upon the land. It wasn’t an absence of history Jason and I felt; it was more a period of grace from it, a respite or indulgence that we didn’t deserve but would do our best to appreciate. I remember driving through Norfolk, Virginia, and how the gravitational force of the massive naval base there seemed to generate a field of quiet over the rest of the city. A few days later, we ate lunch at a diner in Birmingham, Alabama, and were struck by how easygoing everyone seemed and by how, even in Birmingham, where history can drape so thickly, lightness has its moments. In Texas, we decided to push on through the night, without stopping to sleep, and so we ended up encountering Ciudad Juárez, El Paso’s dark twin, as a ghostly procession of lights that seemed to stretch on forever. On our last day of driving, we passed by the factory farms of California’s Central Valley and with them, the greatest miasma of cow shit I’ve ever known. It was a good drive. There’s a way of thinking about that time now that denies the lightness, that condemns us for our dozing, half-amnesiac fantasies. Everything that was shortly to come, we’re told, was already pushing up toward the crust, germinating, waiting to be born. The towers, the storms, the pandemics, the protests, the wars. They were the inexorable

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consequences of our sins, the just verdicts of history. History would return, and we would be punished. And it’s hard these days to deny the force of this story. We are being punished, and probably we deserve it. Yet I find myself resisting ever more urgently the conclusions that too easily follow from that—about what kind of art we should create and value and about how we should be with ourselves and each other. We are all guilty, but must we all be punished? As I sit with Dave and Libby in their kitchen, cable news on in the background, I have no answers. Air Guitar, as lovely as it is, will not end racism, bring peace to the Middle East, or solve climate change. If Dave had the answers to these problems, he wouldn’t be sitting in his kitchen, like the rest of us, taking solace in cable news soliloquies. What has become clearer to me, though, is that Dave is right about what kind of art is not the answer. It will not be, and this almost goes without saying, anything that is made by aryan muscle-boys of the right, with their bar-band covers of Heimat and Herrenvolk. And it will not be work born of the mirrored galleries of the aryan muscle-boy left, with its infinitely reflecting visions of carefully pruned souls endlessly watching and reproaching and correcting each other. Whatever justice is made of—and, no doubt, anger and judgment and maybe even surveillance are elements in the mix—art is not downstream from it. It is not an extension, distraction, evasion, or even, in a simple way, a complement to justice. It is a rival source of value in the world. Art will not save us, but it might—unstably, unpredictably, miraculously—save us, you and me, for a little while. Dave’s great task has been to elucidate this truth, to explain how art creates and socializes visions of the world as we would like it to be, and to spin off just such visions himself. Once in the world, these visions are available to be, and have in fact been, socialized by us. And he does it over and over again, across the galaxy.

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Dave’s visions often begin with visual art, but they have extended out democratically to include music, television, movies, theater, sports, professional wrestling, architecture, and whatever other realms of human endeavor in and through which people struggle to create and sustain meaning and joy in a place like America. Air Guitar, in particular, is less an argument against bureaucratic mediation than a series of literary efforts to conjure up a menagerie of beautiful edens—visions, only briefly realizable if at all, of life as we would like it to be and of art as it occasionally can be. It is Siegfried and Roy in Vegas and Caravaggio in Rome. It is catching the perfect wave off the coast of Southern California and playing at being a high roller—which is to say, being a high roller, if only for a few hours—at the Bellagio in Vegas. It is Herr Volbach at Texas Christian, trailing memories of Weimar Berlin, journeying through time and space and the medium of Dave to exhort me (and so many others): “Hey! You up there! Yes, you! Aryan muscle-boy! Can’t you count? Don’t you have any bones? You look like a piece of meat up there. Be electric! Act like a human creature!”18 Toward the end of Air Guitar, Dave has an essay on basketball, “The Heresy of the Zone Defense,” that is a sentimental favorite of mine. It’s not a perfect work. It is marred, in particular, by the tonal stutter that can creep into Dave’s work when he is trying too hard to demonstrate ease with Black vernacular. But it is a drop-dead brilliant structural and sociological analysis of basketball, and it is one of only two times in his writing when my hometown of Springfield gets a mention. The city is there, of course, because it’s where James Naismith invented the game of basketball in 1891. Naismith’s hope was that the game could help domesticate the young working-class toughs who hung out at the local YMCA during the winter months. He thought its simple rules and gameplay would civilize the youths, but he had the chain of causation backward.

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It was, in fact, the kids who would take possession of the space within Naismith’s structure and use it to create an engine of American beauty and improvisation that to this day civilizes and revitalizes the rest of us. My attachment to the piece is overdetermined. It’s a virtuoso performance by Hickey, beautiful and seductive in the way it dances back and forth between basketball and democracy until, after a while, the two are indistinguishable. It mythologizes Springfield, which is manna for an exile like me. And I was a Philadelphia 76ers fan when I was a kid, and so a possessor, in some small way, of the apotheotic moment with which Hickey begins the essay. Though really, as he would insist, it is a moment that belongs to all of us. “It’s in the third quarter,” Dave writes. “The fifth game of the 1980 NBA Finals. Lakers versus Seventy-Sixers. “Maurice Cheeks is bringing the ball up the court for the Sixers. He snaps the rock off to Julius Erving, and Julius is driving to the basket from the right side of the lane against Kareem Abdul Jabbar. Julius takes the ball in one hand and elevates, leaves the floor. Kareem goes up to block his path, arms above his head. Julius ducks, passes under Kareem’s outside arm and then under the backboard. He looks like he’s flying out of bounds. But no! Somehow, Erving turns his body in the air, reaches back under the backboard from behind, and lays the ball up into the basket from the left side! “When Erving makes this shot, I rise into the air and hang there for an instant, held aloft by sympathetic magic. When I return to earth, everybody in the room is screaming, ‘I gotta see the replay!’ They replay it. And there it is again. Jesus, what an amazing play! Just the celestial athleticism of it is stunning, but the tenacity and purposefulness of it, the fluid stream of instantaneous micro-decisions that go into Erving’s completing it . . . well, it just breaks your heart.”19

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Before I left their house, Dave gave me a copy of the catalogue for Beau Monde. I had a library copy back at home, but it’s a beautiful object, and it meant something to have a copy of my own, given to me by Dave. Holding the book later that evening in our hotel room, I reflected on whether there was something really important that I had missed back in 2001, when I left the show without feeling especially changed or imprinted by it. This, Dave said as he handed it to me, was the best visual instantiation of my ideas. Dave was wrong. Beau Monde was brilliant and beautiful, and it was, I’m told, influential in museum and gallery circles. It shifted how other curators thought about and did their work and in that sense was perhaps even more striking a testament to Dave’s raw talent than his writing. Curating wasn’t even his main thing, and he knocked it out of the park. But Beau Monde wasn’t all of him, or the heart of him. In 2007, toward the end of his time in Vegas, Dave was invited by Libby and the Las Vegas Museum to curate an exhibition of work by his former students. They called it Las Vegas Diaspora: The Emergence of Contemporary Art from the Neon Homeland. Leafing through the catalogue now, it seems obvious it must have been a great show to see. But what really hits me, and what sets it apart, is the warmth and affection that courses through the catalogue, palpable even to someone who wasn’t there. Also heartbreak, and melancholy, and joy. My wife and I read through the catalogue essay one night in bed. This is not something we normally do. Occasionally she’ll read a passage to me from something she’s reading, but as a rule, we don’t commune over literature. We certainly don’t read the same thing at the same time. That night, though, I wanted to read a passage from it to her because it seemed evocative of Dave in a way that I thought she might find interesting as a psychotherapist.

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I started reading it, and she interrupted me: “Let me just read it with you, it’ll be easier.” And so we kept going together, reading page after page until we got to the end, at which point she said something like, “God, he’s good,” then turned back to her novel. What struck me, then, were three things. One was that she was right. It was good. The second was that it wasn’t his best. On purely literary terms, it was A-minus Hickey. The last was that that wasn’t the point. He had done something smaller but more intimate. He had written a letter of gratitude to his students, and an elegy for the working family they collectively built, with its quirks and inside jokes and evolving storylines. The essay wasn’t for posterity. It was for them. “The subject of Las Vegas Diaspora,” he wrote, “is what the artists taught me and might teach you. In a bad, repressive time, they taught me to get over myself and go to work. They taught me to re-explore the edge of fashion and all the stuff that everyone who’s ‘serious’ really hates. They reminded me that artists don’t ‘develop,’ don’t know what they’re doing, and don’t hesitate to do it anyway. So, I am grateful to them for the twelve years that my wife and I taught in one of the best, most famous graduate programs in the world. . . . And why were we famous? Because the program did its job. It helped launch careers, and provided hope for others who still persevere. It did very little harm. It didn’t break students’ hearts or punish them for failure or success. For all of us involved, it marked the beginning of something like a better life. For Las Vegas and the university, it was just a flicker, a bright moment, but, if the cards had fallen as they might have fallen, we could have had it all.”20 For me, the most poignant part of the whole catalogue is the yearbook-style photo spread toward the end, after the plates and essay, in which Dave and Libby assembled a few pages of snapshots of their students hanging out and having fun. The pics aren’t artsy. They’re not even faux-primitive artsy. They’re just what they appear to be, which

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Dave Hickey.

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are the kinds of photos people take of themselves and their friends to document the moment and someday have something that conjures up echoes of the feelings. There are a lot of shots with drinks in hand. A lot of smiles. One Elvis. One Playboy bunny. And in all the photos, with all the permutations of smiling artists, only one Dave. And in that one picture he’s all alone, standing on a balcony, nondescript Vegas sprawl in the background, pursing his lips in a way that’s either intended to look mysterious or is just awkward (probably the latter). I was on the phone with Dave the other day, and I asked him whether it was intentional. It was almost too perfect, I said. You have this whole scene that revolved around you, that wouldn’t have come into existence without you, that was visibly the source of so much joy for all these people, and in the middle of it all but apart from everyone is this one lonely picture of you. Surely it was deliberate. “I just picked the ones I liked,” he said, and I believed him.

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Thank You. 1995. Vinyl on vinyl commercial banner. 48 × 40 in. Karen Carson.

I’m still tickled that I’m able to publish this idiosyncratic book. Sarah Bird, Austin comrade of mine, introduced me not just to Dave Hickey, with whom she’s been friends for decades, but also to Gianna LaMorte at the University of Texas Press. Sarah and I hatched an early version of the idea for this book over drinks at a Texas Book Festival party, and she’s been an enthusiastic advocate ever since. Gianna and Dave Hamrick at UT Press embraced my vision for the book, and I appreciate their trust and leap of faith. Robert Devens, who succeeded Dave as director of the press, has been fantastic, as has Casey Kittrell, who has lived up to all the great things so many Texas writers say about him. My experience with everyone else at UT Press, including Joel Pinckney, Robert Kimzey, Sally Furgeson, and Demi Marshall, has been excellent.

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When I began my interviews, I didn’t anticipate how meaningful it would be to connect with so many people who have played a role in Dave’s life. I loved talking to Sarah Hickey, Dave’s younger sister, who died a few months after we spoke. She lived an extraordinary life, and I was glad to get a glimpse into it, and then glad again that I was able to connect with her daughter Shannan Petropolous. Dave has said to me many times that one of the few areas in which he has shown persistently good judgment is in the women he’s dated and married. That rings true. Mary Jane Crook, Dave’s first wife, helped fill in the picture on Dave’s life in the 1960s and early 1970s and has been consistently supportive. Marshall Chapman, who connected with Dave in Nashville in the 1970s, was helpful on multiple fronts. I drew on the long, juicy passages about Dave in her memoir, Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller. I had a great talk with Susan Freudenheim, who was Dave’s partner in Fort Worth in the 1980s. Libby Lumpkin, who married Dave in 1993, is a force in her own right and has been gracious in accommodating me and the book. Dave still has some good friends in Austin, and I was lucky enough to connect face-to-face with Annette Carlozzi, Jane Hilfer, John Spong, and Terry Allen. In addition to sharing conversation and memories, all four helped with things like photos, old documents, and connections to other people. Amelia Jones was incredibly gracious with her time and story, particularly given her awareness that she and I are on different sides of the fence when it comes to Dave. Jon Baskin was a keen editor of my essay on Dave that he published in The Point. My agent Melissa Flashman continues to be a staunch advocate. A special thanks to Emily Moore, who twenty or so years ago pushed Air Guitar on my brother Mark, who then pushed it on me. Jason Sokol has been a good friend since we were kids; it was nice to have an excuse to get him into this book. Julia Friedman has been a supportive colleague in this endeavor.

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Her edited collections of Dave’s Facebook encounters, Dust Bunnies and Wasted Words, are key texts in the Hickey canon. Gary Kornblau, who was Dave’s seminal editor, provided wise counsel to me as well. Alexander Nehamas helped clarify my thinking on both Dave and the subject of beauty. I also benefitted greatly from talking to Fredericka Hunter, Ed Ruscha, Tim Bavington, Mark Lee, Frances Colpitt, Tom Bailey, Louis Grachos, Anne Livet, Jennifer Faist, Peter Plagens, and Don Graham (who died a few months after we spoke). I encountered so much generosity in gathering images for the book. Thank you to Karen Carson, Ian Jehle, Jeffrey Vallance, Bridget Riley, Nic Nicosia, James Gobel, Elizabeth Peyton, the estate of Sarah Charlesworth, the estate of Roy Lichtenstein, the estate of Hannah Wilke, the Andy Warhol Museum, the Leo Castelli Gallery, Daniel Trujillo from the Artists Rights Society, Made-line Moya from the Austin History Center, and the Arkansas Arts Center. My parents Tim and Joanne Oppenheimer have always been enormously supportive of my writing. That’s been such a gift. I’m always grateful for the love of my sister Rachel and my brothers Jonathan and Mark. My kids Jolie, Asa, and Gideon keep my life full. I wouldn’t have had the rootedness to write this book without them. My insight into Dave was enriched in small and big ways by my wife Jessica, who is a brilliant psychotherapist and smarter than I on various aspects of the human psyche. Thank you. I love you. My relationship to Dave Hickey’s writing has shaped my life. I didn’t expect to have a relationship with the man himself, but I am grateful for it. He’s been a warm presence in my life for the last few years, was a gracious host (with Libby) when I visited with my family in Santa Fe, and has proven blessedly uninterested in influencing how I write about him. Like his writing, he gives permission and encourages autonomy. I needed that. I think most of us do.

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I n t roduc tion 1. See https://www.google.com/books/edition/Pagan_America/pS2cAAAA QBAJ?hl=en. 2. Dave Hickey, “Proof through the Night,” Prior Convictions (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989), 168. 3. Dave Hickey, “American Beauty,” The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, Revised and Expanded (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 74. 4. Ibid. 5. Dave Hickey, “A World Like Santa Barbara,” The Perfect Wave: More Essays on Art and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 44. 6. Hickey, “Wonderful Shoes,” The Perfect Wave, 33. Far from Respe cta b l e , E ve n No w 1. Carole  S. Vance, “The War on Culture,” Art in America (September 1989), reprinted in Richard Bolton, ed., Culture Wars: Documents from Recent Controversies in the Arts (New York: New Press, 1992), 106. 2. “Should a case be charged against a particular NEA grantee for a work considered by a prosecutor to be child pornography (not an unlikely scenario given the history of the agency). .  .  . It would be difficult if not impossible to keep from a jury a defense argument that the material charged is

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not child pornography at all but rather ‘art’ because the NEA has provided funding for its production or distribution.” Testimony of Patrick Trueman, Congressional Record, vol. 143, no. 44 (Tuesday, April 15, 1997), govinfo.gov/ content/pkg/CREC-1997-04-15/html/CREC-1997-04-15-pt1-PgE667.htm. 3. “It was a close call. If you went ahead, I suppose you could say you were upholding freedom of artistic expression against possible political pressure. But you have to consider the larger picture. The endowment has been under attack, its appropriation has been cut by the Executive again and again, only to be restored by Congress. And this is a very critical period in the appropriation process. If proceeding with this exhibition hurts N.E.A. appropriations, it is detrimental to the Corcoran and every other art institution.” David Lloyd Kreeger, quoted in Barbara Gamarekian, “Corcoran, to Foil Dispute, Drops Mapplethorpe Show,” New York Times, June 14, 1989, nytimes.com/1989/06/14/arts/corcoran-to-foil-dispute-drops-mapplethorpe -show.html. 4. Coco Fusco, “Andres Serrano Shoots the Klan: An Interview with Andres Serrano,” High Performance (Fall 1991): 42–43. 5. The most explicit reference is to Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of St. Thomas. Hickey puts the images on opposing pages of The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles: Art issues Press, 1993), 30–31. 6. Judith Weinraub, “Arts Agency Issues Obscenity Guidelines,” Washington Post, July 11, 1990, washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1990/07/11/artsagency-issues-obscenity-guidelines/6018771c-90c2-46c1-aca6-4ce97b 6476ae. 7. “The Grand Jurors of the County of Hamilton, in the name and by authority of the State of Ohio, upon their oaths do find and present that The Contemporary Arts Center and Dennis Barrie, on or about the 7th day of April in the year Nineteen Hundred and Ninety at the County of Hamilton and State of Ohio aforesaid, did, with knowledge of the character of the material involved, publicly display or exhibit the following material: a photograph depicting the forearm and hand of one person inserted into the anus of another, a photograph of a finger inserted into a penis, a photograph

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of a cylindrical object being inserted into an anus, a photograph of a man urinating into the mouth of another man, and a photograph of a man with a whip inserted in his anus, any one or all of which are obscene . . . and against the peace and dignity of the State of Ohio.” Cincinnati v. Contemporary Arts Center, Municipal Court, Hamilton County, June 19, 1990, 566, N.E.2d 207 (Ohio Misc. 1990). 8. “‘This Mapplethorpe fellow,’ said Mr. Helms, who pronounces the artist’s name several ways, ‘was an acknowledged homosexual. He’s dead now, but the homosexual theme goes throughout his work.’ As Mr. Helms sees it, ‘If someone wants to write ugly nasty things on the men’s room wall, the taxpayers do not provide the crayons.’” Maureen Dowd, “Unruffled Helms Basks in Eye of Arts Storm,” New York Times, July 28, 1989, nytimes.com/ 1989/07/28/arts/unruffled-helms-basks-in-eye-of-arts-storm.html. 9. Hickey, “Enter the Dragon,” The Invisible Dragon, 21. 10. Janet Kardon, Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1989), 12–13. 11. Hickey, “Enter the Dragon,” The Invisible Dragon, 11. 12. Ibid., 12. 13. Ibid., 13. 14. Hickey, “After the Great Tsunami,” The Invisible Dragon, 53. 15. Ibid., 59. 16. Hickey, “Enter the Dragon,” The Invisible Dragon, 22. 17. Hickey would later characterize this dynamic like so: “[F]or the past thirty years the left and right wings of American culture have urgently conspired to mitigate art’s ability to civilize us by striving to ‘civilize’ art itself. They have conspired to limit our freedom to construct new meanings and values for works of art: the right wing by seeking to censor any art that might generate healthy anxiety; the left by explaining away art’s ability to challenge us individually, by presenting art to us in perfectly controlled, explained, and contextualized packages. The consequence of this conspiracy has been the authoritarian and therapeutic pollution of art’s last free public habitat.”

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Dave Hickey, “A World Like Santa Barbara,” The Perfect Wave (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 46. 18. Hickey, “Nothing Like the Son,” The Invisible Dragon, 31–32. 19. Ibid., 18. T he Sem i-Tr a nsconti nenta l Ep i ph an y Tact ic 1. Hickey, “Shining Hours/Forgiving Rhyme,” Air Guitar, 34. 2. Ibid., 35. 3. State of Texas Certificate of Death, David Cecil Hickey, Jr., File no. 20350, issued May 2, 1955. Date of Death: April 30, 1955. 4. Years later, the family would hear a rumor, never confirmed, that Hickey’s father had been fired from his job at a car dealership just days before the suicide. According to the rumor, he was accused of stealing some parts from the dealership. He denied the accusation, and there was no direct proof, but he was (so the story goes) fired anyway. Sarah Hickey, Dave Hickey, and Shannan Petropolous, interview with the author. 5. Sarah Hickey, interview with the author, June 23, 2019. 6. Ibid. 7. Hickey, “Baby Breakers,” The Perfect Wave, 6. 8. Ibid., 7. 9. Ibid., 8. Hickey continued: “Since the day they discovered me gestating in my mother’s womb, they had been pissed off at me. My dad was a musician and I ruined that. My mom was a painter and I ruined that too. Neither would abandon their dreams unless the other did. It was a Mexican standoff. They just stood there, in the shiny glass living room, eye to eye, daring one another.” 10. Anne Livet, interview with the author, April 1, 2019. 11. Ibid. 12. Gary Kornblau, interview with the author, April 24, 2019. 13. Hickey, “Shining Hours/Forgiving Rhyme,” The Perfect Wave, 39, 41. 14. Dave Hickey, interview with the author, March 14, 2019.

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15. Ibid. 16. “Southern liberals, and especially Southern writers, seem to be mesmerized by the Huey Longs and Lyndon Johnsons of the world. Like a rat hypnotized by a cobra, they watch and record their subtle manipulation of power, well aware that even by watching and admiring the deadly quickness and cruel freedom of action, they are placing the very principles by which they live in jeopardy. The books which have resulted from this fatal admiration exude a queer kind of spiritual desolation and self-castigation.” Dave Hickey, “Spectator Politics in Redneck Rococo,” Texas Observer, July 8, 1966, 5. 17. Cand Lowry, “Gallery Named After Short Story,” Austin American, November 16, 1969, 80. 18. “Whatever the reasons, Palley’s venture into avant-garde art has been stormy so far. Despite the fact that he’s been willing to pay an incredible (for art) $20,000 a year for a curator, he’s run through at least six in the past two years. One of these is a thirty-two-year-old, chain-smoking Texan named Dave Hicky [sic]. Hicky had done something that is virtually impossible in the art world. He had built a national reputation and become well-known and respected in the New York art community from a homebase gallery in Austin called ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.’ Hicky’s eye for young talent raised a lot of important eyebrows. He and his wife moved to New York in June, 1971, and he became Palley’s new curator. ‘I thought Reese wanted two things from me,’ Hicky says. ‘I thought he wanted to sell art—which I knew I could do—and I thought he wanted me to build a prestigious gallery, something he desperately needed to do. I didn’t know one of my jobs would be to give Reese a short lesson in the history of western art every ten minutes. Anyway, it turned out he wasn’t interested in doing either of the things I thought I was hired to do. Reese lives off the emotional hype of selling. I found it difficult to bring in a serious collector without having Reese barge over and do his little pat-on-the-ass number. . . . Anyway, my experience was not a happy one. When I left I felt like a ship leaving a sinking rat.’” Jerry Bowles, “If Cartier, Tiffany, Porthault, Harry Winston, Bonwit Teller, etc. Can’t Make the Rich Happy, Who Can?” Esquire (September 1972), classic.

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esquire.com/article/1972/09/01/if-cartier-tiffany-porthault-harry-winstonbonwit-teller-etc-cant-make-the-rich-happy-who-can. 19. Dave Hickey, interview with the author, March 28, 2019. 20. Peter Schjeldahl, “Two on the Move in a ‘Movement-Less’ Time,” New York Times, March 19, 1972, nytimes.com/1972/03/19/archives/two-on-the-move -in-a-movementless-time.html; David L. Shirey, “‘Landscape’ Mood Noted In Twombly’s Canvases,” New York Times, January 22, 1972, nytimes.com/ 1972/01/22/archives/landscape-mood-noted-in-twomblys-canvases.html. 21. Dave Hickey, “‘Sharp Focus Realism’ at Janis,” Art in America 60, no. 2 (March–April 1972): 116. 22. Ibid. 23. Dave Hickey, “Earthscapes, Landworks and Oz,” Art in America 59, no. 5 (September–October 1971): 48. 24. Dave Hickey, “The Texas to New York via Nashville Semi-Transcontinental Epiphany Tactic,” Art in America 60, no. 5 (September–October 1972): 54. 25. Dave Hickey, interview with the author, March 14, 2019. 26. Mary Jane (Taylor) Crook, interview with the author, April 2, 2019. 27. Dave Hickey, “Dave Hickey on Songwriting,” Miami Rail 22 (Winter 2017), miamirail.org/issue-22/dave-hickey-on-songwriting. 28. Dave Hickey, “A Night of ‘Hillbilly Reality’ with Tompall Glaser,” Country Music (December 1973): 58–61. 29. Provided to author by Marshall Chapman, interview with the author, March 20, 2019. 30. Dave Hickey, “In Defense of the Telecaster Cowboy Outlaws,” Country Music (January 1974): 91–93. 31. Dave Hickey, interview with the author, March 28, 2019. 32. Dave Hickey, “Outlaw Blues,” Country Music (February 1977): 23. 33. Ibid. 34. Dave Hickey, interview with the author, March 14, 2019.

T O P A G E S 6 4 – 7 3

1. Amelia Jones, phone interview with the author, November 21, 2018. 2. Beverly Beyette, “Guess Who Came (Again) to ‘Dinner’?” Los Angeles Times, April 12, 1996. 3. Christopher Knight, “More Famine Than Feast; Focusing on the Flawed ‘Dinner Party’ Undermines ‘Sexual Politics,’” Los Angeles Times, May 2, 1996. 4. Libby Lumpkin, “Unintended (Ph)allacies: A Feminist Reading of ‘Sexual Politics,’” Art issues 44 (September/October 1996). 5. Amelia Jones, phone interview with the author, November 21, 2018. 6. Amelia Jones, “‘Every man knows where and how beauty gives him pleasure’: Beauty Discourse and the Logic of Aesthetics,” in Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age, ed. Emory Elliott, Lou Freitas Caton, and Jeffrey Rhyne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 215–239. 7. Ibid, 216. 8. “We can at least historicize Ruskin’s comment, which was issued from the midst of the heatedly romantic, simultaneously self-assured and culturally anxious moment of mid-nineteenth-century Europe—with its cultural imperialism and burgeoning capitalist markets. Such hubris in the matter of claiming absolute personal authority for aesthetic judgments is, however, troubling in its renewed formulations in the current era of late-capitalist neo-nationalism, multiculturalism, and contentious public vs. private funding debates.” Ibid., 7. 9. Ibid., 233. 10. Ibid., 232–233. 11. Hickey, “Frivolity and Unction,” Air Guitar, 204. 12. Hickey, “The Birth of the Big, Beautiful Art Market,” Air Guitar, 61. 13. “Oh I’m a sensitive plant. The world is ablaze to me, and people are kaleidoscopes. I get my feelings hurt, so whatever brashness manifests itself in my manner is to cover that up.” Jarrett Earnest, “Dave Hickey: In Conversation with Jarrett Earnest,” SFAQ (February 2, 2015), sfaq.us/2015/02/dave-hickey -in-conversation-with-jarrett-earnest.

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The Value of Beaut y Re m ains U njus t ifi e d

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N O T E S T O P A G E S 7 3 – 8 4

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14. One of Hickey’s complaints vis-à-vis theory wasn’t that there was too much of it but that it too often was vulgarized by American critics and academics: “Somehow, the delicate instrumentalities of continental thought had been transmuted by the American professoriat into a highfaulting, pseudo-progressive billy club with which to beat dissenters about the head and shoulders.” Hickey, The Invisible Dragon, xviii. 15.  Hickey was influenced by Susan Sontag’s classic essay “Against Interpretation,” with her famous plea for an erotics of art: “Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. . . . In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” Against Interpretation: And Other Essays (New York: Picador, 2001), 7, 14. 16. Hickey, “Simple Hearts,” Air Guitar, 30. 17. Hickey, “Dragon Days: Introduction to the New Edition,” The Invisible Dragon, xiv. 18. Ibid., xix. 19. Alexander Nehamas, “The Return of the Beautiful: Morality, Pleasure, and the Value of Uncertainty,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, 4 (Autumn, 2000): 393–403. 20. Ibid., 402. 21. Ibid., 401. 22. “Hickey’s gritty populism is in the end as hard to accept as Scarry’s highminded moralism. The value of beauty remains unjustified.” Ibid., 402. 23. Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 57. 24. Ibid., 76. 25. “I can admire you for exhibiting ‘a single taste,’ a consistent sensibility, without for that reason admiring the taste you exhibit. . . . And so I understand

N O T E S T O P A G E S 8 5 – 9 3

Dave Hickey’s admiration for Norman Rockwell, whom I continue to find trite and banal, because the formal complexities Hickey finds in his work are of a piece with the devices of the widely accessible art (like Raphael’s, he might say) that celebrates Hickey’s populist democratic values.” Ibid., 88. 26. “We don’t have to agree with Nietzsche that ‘it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified,’ in order to say that ‘aesthetic’ values (among others) permeate every aspect of life. Recent philosophy has succumbed to a moralism according to which the right way of conducting ourselves toward one another is the full answer to Socrates’ question, how one should live. But morality, ‘what we owe each other’ in Thomas Scanlon’s happy phrase, is neither the only nor obviously the most important issue we consider when we try to determine how best to lead our lives.” Ibid., 89. 27. Ibid., 133. 28. Hickey, interview with the author, August 4, 2020. Hi s Simple H e a rt 1. Dave Hickey, “Pirates and Farmers,” Pirates and Farmers (London: Ridinghouse, 2013), 23. 2. Hickey, “My Silk Road,” The Perfect Wave, 72. 3. Ibid., 77. 4. “[I]f you combined Las Vegas and Santa Fe, you would have an ordinary city of the American West, like Phoenix or Los Angeles, with intensified iconography, but with very little redundancy—since, in a very real sense, Las Vegas and Santa Fe are refuges from one another. So, in this new, combined city, Santa Fe would provide the upper crust, the guardian liberal establishment and the indigenous lower depths—the white top and the brown bottom, if you will—while Vegas would provide the green middle—the vast mercantile center of American society. . . . There is no denying that I live in Las Vegas, and have chosen to live there, when I could just as easily reside in Santa Fe. So let me confess at the outset to my preference for the real fakery of Las Vegas

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over the fake reality of Santa Fe—for the genuine rhinestone over the imitation pearl.” Dave Hickey, “Dialectical Utopias,” Harvard Design Magazine 4 (Spring/Summer 1998). www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/4/dialect ical-utopias. 5. Hickey, “My Weimar,” Air Guitar, 84. 6. Ibid., 86. 7. Hickey, “A Home in the Neon,” Air Guitar, 18. 8. Hickey, “Lost Boys: Siegfried and Roy at the Mirage,” Art issues 14 (November 1990): 19; republished in Air Guitar, 172–180. 9. Gary Kornblau, interview with the author, April 24, 2019. 10. Hickey, “Simple Hearts,” Air Guitar, 25. 11. Ibid., 30. 12. Hickey, interview with the author, June 2, 2019. 13. Nic Cha Kim, “East LA Street Artist Gajin Fujita Redesigns LA Public Library Card,” Spectrum News 1, May 30, 2019. https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nc/ coastal/news/2019/05/30/east-la-street-artist-gajin-fujita-redesigns-la -public-library-card. 14. Hickey, interview with the author, June 2, 2019. 15. Hickey, “The Little Church of Perry Mason,” Air Guitar, 145. 16. Hickey, “Simple Hearts,” Air Guitar, 30–31. 17. Hickey, “The Little Church of Perry Mason,” Air Guitar, 145. 18. Hickey, “My Weimar,” Air Guitar, 87. 19. Hickey, “The Heresy of the Zone Defense,” Air Guitar, 155. 20. Dave Hickey, “One Neon Decade,” Las Vegas Diaspora: The Emergency of Contemporary Art from the Neon Homeland (Las Vegas: Las Vegas Art Museum/ Bright City Books, 2007), 69.

ii Ian Jehle, Canadian (Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 1970–), The Theorist (Dave Hickey), 2004–2007, graphite and casein on paper. 96 × 80 in., Arkansas Arts Center Foundation Collection: Purchase, Tabriz Fund. 2014.020.002. 4  Intake. 1964. Acrylic on canvas. 701/4 × 701/4 in. © Bridget Riley 2020. All rights reserved. 7  CL+JG 2099. 2019. 72 × 60 in. James Gobel. Hand-cut felt, flashe, acrylic, embroidery thread, PVA on canvas. Image courtesy of the artist. 16  Polaroid of Robert Mapplethorpe. 1983. Andy Warhol. © 2020 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 19 Dave Hickey at the opening of the new building of the Art Museum of South Texas, October 1972. Photo by Rodney Marionneaux. Courtesy of Fredericka Hunter. 24  David with the Head of Goliath (Vienna). 1610. Caravaggio. Oil on canvas. 491/4 × 393/4 in. Public domain: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_with_the_ Head_of_Goliath_(Caravaggio,_Rome)#/media/File:David_with_the_ Head_of_Goliath-Caravaggio_(1610).jpg. 32–33 Pages 30–31 of The Invisible Dragon. Dave Hickey. © 1993 The Foundation for Advanced Critical Studies, Inc.

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38 Sarah, Michael, and Dave Hickey, circa 1945. Courtesy of Shannan Petropolous. 38 Dave Hickey (lower left), his parents, and his younger sister, circa 1942. Courtesy of Shannan Petropolous. 48 Roy Lichtenstein exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery. 1965. © Castelli Gallery, artwork © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. 50 Dave Hickey at his Austin gallery, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. November 13, 1969. Courtesy of the Austin American-Statesman. 53 Dave Hickey at the Dripping Springs Reunion concert in 1970. Image courtesy of Terry Allen. 57 Fax from Marshall Chapman to Dave Hickey. Courtesy of Marshall Chapman. 68  RM. 2007. Elizabeth Peyton. Direct gravure etching with aquatint in black ink on Shikoku Surface Gampi paper, hand torn. 17 × 13 in. Copyright Elizabeth Peyton, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London, and Two Palms, New York. 71  Golden Glow (detail). 1995. Alexis Smith. Three mixed-media collages (each 29 × 24 in). Courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. 75  Study #3 for Los Angeles County Museum on Fire. 1968. Ed Ruscha, gunpowder and pencil on paper. 7 5/8 × 14 9/16 in. Collection of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. © Ed Ruscha, courtesy of the artist and Gagosian. 78  Text. 1992–1993. Sarah Charlesworth. Gelatin silver print. 26 × 31 in. © The Estate of Sarah Charlesworth. Image courtesy of the Estate of Sarah Charlesworth and Paula Cooper Gallery. 82  Marxism and Art: Beware of Fascist Feminism. 1977. Hannah Wilke. Offset lithograph. 111/4 × 83/4 in. © 2021 Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt, Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. 86 Untitled (Helen Hickey’s suitcase). Nic Nicosia. Image courtesy of the artist.

I L L U S T R A T I O N C R E D I T S

91  Vegas Apocalypse: Mouth of Hell, 1998. Jeffrey Vallance. Graphite on paper. 24 × 30 in. Courtesy of the artist. 98 Professor Walther Volbach. Courtesy Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collection, Special Collections, The University of Texas at Arlington Libraries. 102 Illusionists Siegfried and Roy and friends onstage at the Mirage Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada, just months prior to Roy Horn’s career-disabling mauling by a white tiger in 2003. Carol Highsmith. Library of Congress. Public domain: loc.gov/pictures/item/2011636525. 110 Dave Hickey. Image courtesy of Toby Kamps. 118 Dave Hickey. Image courtesy of Libby Lumpkin. 120  Thank You. 1995. Vinyl on vinyl commercial banner. 48 × 40 in. © Karen Carson. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem, 115 Aerosmith, 55 Art Forum, 22 Art in America, 51–52, 54–56 Art issues, 20, 64–66, 100, 103

Creem, 55, 58 Crook, Mary Jane (Taylor), 46, 54–55

Baez, Joan, 43, 45 Baker, Chet, 104, 111 Bare, Bobby, 55 Bavington, Tim, 111 Brooklyn Museum, 65

Earnest, Jarrett, 62 Erving, Julius, 3, 115

Caravaggio, 23–24, 114 Carson, Karen, 120 Castelli, Leo, 3, 47–48 Chapman, Marshall, 56–57, 60 Charlesworth, Sarah, 78 A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, 49–50 Conrad, Joseph, 42 Country Music, 55, 58–59 Cox, Renee, 67, 69

Deleuze, Gilles, 73 Dylan, Bob, 43, 45, 56

Flaubert, Gustave, 3, 74, 84, 104–105, 109 Fort Worth, Texas, 35–37, 39, 41, 43, 45, 52, 55, 60, 94, 105 Foucault, Michel, 26, 30, 73, 79, 87, 97 Friedman, Julia, 109–110 Fujita, Gajin, 106 Glaser, Tompall, 55–56, 60 Gobel, James, 7 Greenberg, Clement, 103 Grieger, Scott, 74 Grogan, Asa, 99

I N D E X

Heizer, Michael, 106 Helms, Jesse, 12, 18, 27–28 Hemingway, Ernest, 47 Hickey, David Cecil, Jr., 35–40, 42, 60, 108 Hickey, Helen (Balch), 37–42, 55, 60, 108 Hickey, Mike, 40 Hickey, Sarah, 37–38, 40 Isermann, Jim, 112 Jennings, Waylon, 3, 54, 58, 60 Jimenez, Luis, 49 Johns, Jasper, 47 Jones, Amelia, 63–67, 69–70, 72–73, 77, 81, 87–88 Kant, Immanuel, 67 Kappa Sigma fraternity, 42–43 Knight, Christopher, 64, 66, 87, 100 Kornblau, Gary, 44, 62, 100, 103–104 Las Vegas Art Museum, 89, 116–117 Law & Order, 93 Lennon, John, 54 Liberace, 104 Livet, Anne, 43–44 Los Angeles Times, 64 Lumpkin, Libby, 64–67, 87, 89–91, 100, 106, 109, 116 MacArthur Foundation, 56, 92 Mailer, Norman, 43

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Mapplethorpe, Robert, 3, 11–18, 20, 27–28, 30–33, 66–68, 74 Marx, Karl or Marxism, 22, 80, 82 Mercer, Johnny, 36 Michelangelo, 104 Mitchum, Robert, 104 Naismith, James, 114–115 National Endowment for the Arts, 11–12, 14–15, 17, 104 Nehamas, Alexander, 79–81, 83–85, 87 Nelson, Willie, 58–60, 83 Nicosia, Nic, 86, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 84–85, 87 October, 22 Ono, Yoko, 54 Oppenheimer, Tim, 95–96 Parton, Dolly, 58 Penthouse, 55, 58 Perry Mason, 3, 104 Pigault-Lebrun, 74 Pontormo, 81 Rauschenberg, Robert, 47 Reed, Lou, 55, 97 Reese Palley Gallery, 49, 51, 54 Reinhardt, Max, 94 Riley, Bridget, 3–4 Rockwell, Norman, 45, 84, 104 Ruscha, Ed, 74–75 Ruskin, John, 67

Taylor, Mary Jane. See Crook, Mary Jane (Taylor) Texas Christian University, 39, 42–43, 46, 94,114

Texas Observer, 47, 51 Trump, Donald, 106

I N D E X

Scaggs, Boz, 55 Scarry, Elaine, 79, 81 Serrano, Andres, 11–14, 17, 66 Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist Art History, 63–65, 87–88 Shaver, Billy Joe, 54 Siegfried and Roy, 100–104, 114 SITE Santa Fe, 111 Smith, Alexis, 71 Smith, Patti, 74 Southern Methodist University, 42 Springfield, Massachusetts, 111, 114–115 Styron, William, 43

University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 29, 70, 89–90, 96, 100, 107 University of Texas at Austin, 46, 49 Vallance, Jeffrey, 91 Van Gogh, Vincent, 110 Village Voice, 55, 58 Volbach, Walther, 94, 97–98, 114 Waits, Tom, 55 Warhol, Andy, 16, 30, 47, 97, 107 Wilde, Oscar, 87 Wilke, Hannah, 82 Williams, Hank, 104 Wolfe, Tom, 100

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