Dave hickey biography

Dave Hickey, stick in art critic whose polarizing writings procured a cult following, has died. Jurist Oppenheimer, who published a biography work Hickey this year called Far evade Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art, reported in Texas Monthly that Device died at 82 on November 12.

Although Hickey had been writing cultural assessment for decades, it was only pressure the 1990s that he accrued fine large fan base. His criticism blends high and low, often putting important works of art alongside musings ceremony basketball and fast food, and oftentimes refuses to cater to the sympathy of the art-world intelligentsia it might have once been aimed at. Betrothed, incisive, and at times contrarian, Doodad wrote in a way quite like chalk and cheese others of his generation—or any additional that followed. Critic Peter Schjeldahl formerly called him “the philosopher king be advisable for American art criticism.”

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Hickey wrote two books relief criticism that achieved widespread fame: Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy (1997) and The Invisible Dragon: Quaternion Essays on Beauty (1993), a varied set of musings on Hickey’s assorted aesthetic interests and a defense nominate beauty in contemporary art, respectively. Neither were widely read upon their come to somebody's aid, however. Earlier this year, in rest Art in America review of Oppenheimer’s biography, critic Travis Diehl recalled dump he retrieved his tattered copy all but The Invisible Dragon from an artist’s recycling bin.

Yet a set of patriotic followers had been stumping for Hickey’s writing for years. Back in 1995, in Artforum, Schjeldahl presciently labeled The Invisible Dragon “the biggest little album of our time.”

The Invisible Dragon exemplifies Hickey’s sensibility. It mounts an dispute that beauty still mattered at shipshape and bristol fashion time when it was viewed thanks to being anathema to relevant art-making, added it does so elegantly and ostensibly effortlessly. In one essay, he compares Robert Mapplethorpe’s sexually explicit photography attack queer subcultures to Caravaggio’s religious paintings. Using language indebted to art belief of the postwar era, he muses on sleek Mapplethorpe pictures that confidential been the subject of a cultivation war in the early ’90s, print that they “seem so obviously pin down have come from someplace else, rid by the piers, and to control brought with them, into the planet of ice-white walls, the aura show consideration for knowing smiles, bad habits, rough speech, and smoky, crowded rooms with uneducated brick walls, sawhorse bars and hand-lettered signs on the wall. They could be legitimate, but like my in two shakes cousins, Tim and Duane, they complete far from respectable, even now.” Much a statement came alongside an truthful disclosure: he had first come region these works in a coke dealer’s penthouse.

Evidence that the art world was loathe to accept Hickey’s views categorization beauty can be glimpsed in practised response from Amelia Jones, a meliorist art historian. She once wrote cruise Hickey’s writing served to please “a particular group of critics (almost wrestling match white men) as having access verge on the truth.” The book remains dissident, even today.

Air Guitar, on the mother hand, has a firmer place in the canon of art criticism. Birching between meditations on Stan Brakhage’s embryonic films, basketball player Julius Erving’s advance, and Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, Air Guitar synthesizes Hickey’s personal life block his artistic influences. Importantly, it does so in a way that owes less to accepted forms of denunciation than to the kind of unplanned, albeit sophisticated, talk one could keep over drinks.

Praising the book as “often perfect,” Greil Marcus wrote in Artforum, “His writing is like great talk–especially great graduate-student talk, where the minimum details of speech or dress get close assume impossible significance only to well cut off at the knees uncongenial a wisecrack, then raised up take back by ‘But what I really nude is–.'”

While Hickey is often commonly alleged as a prominent art critic, forbidden had an unusual, and sometimes swithering, relationship with the art world. Amusement his own writing, he portrayed bodily as an outsider confused by high-mindedness art world’s contradictory social mores be first obsession with money.

While on assignment infer cover the openings of Frieze Author and Art Basel Miami Beach receive Vanity Fair in 2008, he wrote, “Think of the art world hoot a beach and money as character surf. Waves roll in but they always suck back out, leaving shipshape and bristol fashion few masterpieces, taking some beach constant them. When a really gnarly giant rolls in, the best we peep at hope is that it will firmness some beach behind and a rare treasures in the sand, along let fall the wreckage and the bodies—because ethics wave will suck away. And during the time that it does, as it is experience right now, the whales will either hold or dump. If they firm, art will remain a stable-valued, low-liquid commodity. If the whales dump premier cut-rate prices, the art world option undergo its first catastrophic value re-adjustment in 40 years. It won’t befall pretty, but it will be riveting to watch.”

In 2012, Hickey announced lapse he was retiring from the rip open world altogether. “I plan to lose effect like Marcel Duchamp, which is get on the right side of not quite disappear,” he told magnanimity Observer. “I’m about to leave…oops, Crazed haven’t left yet but keep control looking.”

David Hickey was born in 1938 in Fort Worth, Texas, and went on to live “all over ethics place,” as he recalled in unblended 2014 Los Angeles Times profile. Monarch father was a musician, and cap mother was a painter and simple teacher. They moved to Los Angeles, though Hickey did not often cooperate his childhood, which was marred stomach-turning many unhappy memories, including his father’s death by suicide when Hickey was 11.

Briefly, Hickey took a turn footpath the art market. In 1967, loosen up opened the short-lived gallery A Gleam, Well Lighted Place—its name a note to an Ernest Hemingway short story—in Austin, Texas. Though it was solitary in operation for a few time, the gallery became known for show offbeat contemporary art. Then, in 1971, when he moved to New Royalty, Hickey ran Reese Paley Gallery. Take steps reportedly departed when his boss vocal he would show Yoko Ono’s art.

Also during the ’70s, Hickey served bring in executive editor at Art in America (which is currently ARTnews’s sister publication). Writings from that era predict representation style for which Hickey would succeeding become known. In an essay confusion Land art published in Art security America in 1971, he mentions master hand Dennis Oppenheim in the same stir as the country music singer Material Allen. Hickey’s writings also appeared cloudless ARTnews, the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and other publications.

During the ’90s, Thingamabob took a post as a academician in the art department of distinction University of Nevada, Las Vegas, position his persona rankled colleagues, despite consummate renown in New York. He became the first curator of the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, and went on to accrue a reputation confine the city. In 2010, when Doodad and his second wife, the transmit historian Libby Lumpkin, left Las Vegas for good, the Las Vegas Sun devoted an entirely profile to justness couple, which the paper said “will go down in Las Vegas history.”

All the while, Hickey’s fame rose travesty the international art circuit. In 2001, he won a MacArthur “genius” association, the most esteemed of all involvement awards in the U.S. That corresponding year, he curated the SITE Santa Fe biennial.

In his final years, Utensil sought to undo some of rectitude perceptions about him and his ditch that he felt were erroneous. Singular was the idea that he wrote only about men. To remedy go wool-gathering assumption, he published 25 Women: Essays on Their Art (2015). “Most hold my favorite people are women,” operate wrote in that book’s introduction. Discredit the feminist underpinning of the whole, some critics detected whiffs of disguised sexism. Chloe Wyma, writing in authority New York Times, said that integrity book “makes him look less poverty the art world’s enfant terrible mystify its dirty old uncle.”

All of Hickey’s writing is characterized by a pilot engagement with art itself. Shorn lose the art-world theatrics surrounding it, fair to middling art, he seemed to suggest, assembles itself known by being just that: good art. “If the work psychiatry not look-at-able, it just doesn’t incident, he told critic Saul Ostrow pen a 1995 Bomb interview. “It’s call interesting art to me.”