Dave Hickey
I'm retiring because my time is up.
My mother was an economics professor. I'm proficient in math, and statistics, game theory, symbolic logic and all of that.
I hate all that woozy political and psychotherapeutic crap applied to books and art.
Where do you learn how to act? Not at church. America is a lot more like pagan Rome than we think. We still sacrifice to objects to gain our social goals.
Martha Stewart contributes more to our civility than the Baptist church.
Art editors and critics - people like me - have become a courtier class.
If I go to London, everyone wants to talk about Damien Hirst. I'm just not interested in him. Never have been.
It used to be that if you stood in front of a painting you didn't understand, you'd have some obligation to guess. Now you don't.
Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else's privilege.Collection: Real
With the artists, I don't teach, I coach. I can't tell them how to make art. I tell them to make more art. I tell them to get up early and stay up late. I tell them not to quit. I tell them if somebody else is already making their work. My job is to be current with the discourse and not be an asshole. That's all I wanted in a professor.Collection: Art
Art and writing come from somewhere down around the lizard brain. It's a much more peculiar activity than we like to think it is. The problems arise when we try to domesticate the practice, to pretend that it's a normal human activity and that "everybody's creative." They're not.Collection: Art
Beauty is and always will be blue skies and open highway.Collection: Blue
Beautiful art sells. If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells anything else, it is a seductive advertisement.Collection: Beautiful
Art has political consequences, which is to say, it reorganizes society and creates constituencies of people around it.Collection: Art
...There are issues worth advancing in images worth admiring; and the truth is never "plain," nor appearances ever "sincere." To try to make them so is to neutralize the primary, gorgeous eccentricity of imagery in Western culture since the Reformation: the fact that it cannot be trusted, that imagery is always presumed to be proposing something contestable and controversial. This is the sheer, ebullient, slithering, dangerous fun of it. No image is presumed inviolable in our dance hall of visual politics, and all images are potentially powerful.Collection: Fun
Choosing beauty over content (or choosing beauty as content) is always an act of sedition. If we accept the cant of official culture, we must believe that the beauty we steal from any man-made thing is stolen from its more virtuous and metaphysical backstory, wherein "real" beauty is said to reside.Collection: Real
Out of sheer perversity, I followed beauty where it lead, into the silence.Collection: Silence
In my experience, you always think you know what you're doing; you always think you can explain, but you always discover, years later, that you didn't and you couldn't. This leads me to suspect that the principal function of human reason is to rationalize what your lizard brain demands of you. That's my idea.Collection: Thinking
Most famous artists are created by their work and the idea of them as a character, and if they're smart and ambitious, they reinforce that character because they want to win. They want their views to prevail.Collection: Smart
I have no evangelical feelings about art at all. I despise art education. Art doesn't lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It's a set of propositions about how things should look.Collection: Art
I don't think the government should touch art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage risk-averse personalities to be artists.Collection: Art
Gossip is the currency of the discourse, so you should shut up about yourself. Never confess, never explain, never apologize, and never complain.Collection: Gossip
Even if one succeeds in making a silk purse out of a sow's ear, there remains the problem of what to do with a one-eared sow.Collection: Ears
Jazz presumes that it would be nice if the four of us-simpatico dudes that we are-while playing this complicated song together, might somehow be free and autonomous as well. Tragically, this never quite works out. At best, we can only be free one or two at a time-while the other dudes hold onto the wire. Which is not to say that no one has tried to dispense with wires. Many have, and sometimes it works-but it doesn't feel like jazz when it does. The music simply drifts away into the stratosphere of formal dialectic, beyond our social concerns.Collection: Song
In images,... beauty was the agency that caused visual pleasure in the beholder; and any theory of images that was not grounded in the pleasure of the beholder begged the question of their efficacy and doomed itself to inconsequence.Collection: Agency
The idea of political content is irrelevant. Content is irrelevant. I always tell my students, "Never forget you're writing words! You know, word one, word two, word three, word four. The words have to be organized. Nothing else does."Collection: Writing
I think that if you don't like something and it's not easy, you shouldn't be doing it.Collection: Thinking
When you really respect somebody who does something different from you, your respect is for the quality of the job.Collection: Jobs
As my friend Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe has argued persuasively, there is an element of positivity in the visible world, and in color particularly, that totally eludes the historicity of language, with its protocols of absence and polarity. The color red, as an attribute of the world, is always there. It is something other than the absence of yellow and blue--and, thus, when that red becomes less red, it becomes more one or the other. It never exists in a linguistic condition of degradation or excess that must necessarily derive from our expectations.Collection: Positivity