Dave HickeyCritiques

Published in conjunction with exhibition at the Pomona College Museum of Art, January 22 – April 19, 2006 Curated by Rebecca McGrew. Essays by Ed Hamilton and Dave Hickey. .

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Best book of art writing ever. These all first appeared in the late lamented LA journal Art Issues, and Hickey's writing was why I subscribed. (Though there was also a Peter Schjeldahl article on Martin Luther that just killed me.) The journal did not survive its creeping smartiness, but fortunately before it folded its tents it published this fine and handsome anthology of its most miraculous writer's incidental works. You will not regret reading this. You'll not see art the same way after.

Beauty versus 'the beautiful'; beauty versus meaning; beauty versus the market.
Art as a fomenting agent of revolution. The artistic institution as the subduer of alternative vision.
I would be very foolish to say what Mr. Hickey was or was not espousing (he's way too smart and articulate and my vocabulary is not up to the task), but my humble take on the essays in The Invisible Dragon would be thus: "when we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change," and, perhaps, when we change the we speak of things, the things we speak of change us.

Pontormo, Flaubert, Chet Baker, Ed Ruscha, Bubble Puppy, Shiva's Headband, Tristam Shandy, quotidian, plangent, tristesse, horror vacui, teological,......head spinning, captivating, brilliant...

The exhibition at the Hayward Gallery was a really great retrospective with lots of fantastic work spanning decades. Her paintings are miracles. This book is lovely and well produced, and a nice reminder of it. The essays are interesting though some of them do cover similar ground but I always learn something reading about Bridget Riley's work and methods.

With wit and insight, critic Hickey walks us through Gober's disturbing site-specific installation at Dia.

A few great essays about art. A bunch of pretty good ones. I do like Hickey's style, though, and respect his thinking.

These lovely essays on pop culture, art and music, have altered my views and added to my overall art vocabulary. I especially love his essay on Hank Williams in the Glass Bottom Cadillac. Although a bit dated in perspective, most of the writing is classic and withstands modern standards of art criticism.

Published on the occasion of an exhibition held at Dia Center for the Arts, New York, 24 Sep 1992-20 Jun 1993.

also see Dave Eggers, David Sedaris

Mostly good.

amazingly insightful. this book helps to put the universe in order.

hilarious, hickey was continually shifting my point of view.

In essays on gender and beauty, Robert Mapplethorpe, art institutions and beauty's "vernacular," art critic and teacher Dave Hickey prompts a consideration of aspects of the rhetoric of beauty in Western art. "The vernacular of beauty, in its democratic appeal, remains a potent instrument for change in this civilization," Hickey asserts. But he goes on to say that what stands in the way of change are the museums, universities, foundations and the like "mandated to kidnap an entire province of ongoing artistic endeavor from its purportedly dysfunctional parent culture," to dissect and neutralize the power of images. One could argue with Hickey that new mass art audiences' responses to beauty are helping change both art's institutional framework and its position in our culture. But Hickey is on to something: beauty's reemergence as a coveted value challenges the art professional's role as art custodian. And from the standpoint of those who value democratic culture, this is all to the good.

With the 2012 revised and expanded edition, The Invisible Dragon aims squarely at the hyper-institutionalism that, in Hickey’s view, denies the real pleasures that draw us to art in the first place. Deploying the artworks of Warhol, Raphael, Caravaggio, and Mapplethorpe and the writings of Ruskin, Shakespeare, Deleuze, and Foucault, Hickey takes on museum culture, arid academicism, sclerotic politics, and more—all in the service of making readers rethink the nature of art. A new introduction provides a context for earlier essays—what Hickey calls his "intellectual temper tantrums." A new essay, "American Beauty," concludes the volume with a historical argument that is a rousing paean to the inherently democratic nature of attention to beauty.