The Art World Is the Last Unregulated Industry Libby Lumpkin
Dave Hickey, Iconoclastic Art Critic, Dies at 82
His status as an art-earth outsider, and every bit a staunch defender of "beauty" in art, drew him legions of fans and enemies alike.
Dave Hickey, who at various points in his life owned an fine art gallery in Texas, hung out with Andy Warhol in New York, wrote country music in Nashville and, finally, settled into a career equally one of the country's leading and almost divisive art critics, died on November. 12 at his home in Santa Atomic number 26, North.K. He was 82.
His married woman, the art historian Libby Lumpkin, said the cause was heart disease.
Drawing on his decades of disparate and frequently debauched living, Mr. Hickey's criticism was at once erudite and quotidian. He dashed from Derrida to Liberace, zone defense to Cezanne, rejecting any distinction between high and low culture and insisting on the extreme subjectivity of aesthetic standards.
"There's no difference between the highest art and the lowest art except for the audience it appeals to," he told The Los Angeles Times in 2002. "Bad taste is existent taste, of course, and skillful sense of taste is the balance of someone else's privilege."
Mr. Hickey, who taught criticism at the Academy of Nevada, Las Vegas, burst onto the fine art- world scene in 1993 with the publication of "The Invisible Dragon: Iv Essays on Beauty." The book did many things, just chief among them was to declare that "the issue of the '90s volition be beauty" — a claim that cruel similar a hydrogen bomb amidst the raging culture wars, in which terms similar "dazzler" had been cast aside equally racist, sexist and elitist.
A chain-smoking white homo given to all-black clothing ensembles and proper noun-dropping artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Ed Ruscha, Mr. Hickey seemed typecast for the part of the retrograde renegade. His offhand, ofttimes off-color jokes — "I similar the art world; there are a lot of gay people and bonny women with depression-cut dresses" — appeared to reinforce the point.
Image
Simply his writing eluded like shooting fish in a barrel pigeonholing. Beauty, he argued, was non an innate quality, just an aspect of how people responded to a work of art and an artery toward understanding its significant. It was subjective and quicksilver, he said, and information technology created the give-and-take that in turn generated the cultural consensus necessary in a democratic society.
"The Invisible Dragon" and a subsequent volume, "Air Guitar: Essays on Fine art and Commonwealth" (1997), established Mr. Hickey as i of the most interesting and sought-later critics of his generation. He lectured widely, wrote dozens of exhibition catalogs and organized several gallery shows.
He won the Frank Jewett Mather Award, the country's highest honor for art criticism, in 1994, and in 2001 he received a "genius" grant from the MacArthur Foundation. Ever the insubordinate, he later said that he used the grant money to larn to play Texas Concur'em poker in Las Vegas.
"Art is not adept for yous," he told The Las Vegas Review-Periodical in 2001. "Information technology's not necessarily therapeutic. It'southward supposed to be exciting. It'south not penicillin. It's more like cocaine. It's a drug. It gets you excited and makes you want more."
David Charles Hickey was born on Dec. five, 1938, in Fort Worth, Texas. He and his family moved ofttimes: His father, David Cecil Hickey, worked for a string of car distribution centers while eking out a career equally a jazz musician.
Young David was peculiarly influenced past a twelvemonth spent in Southern California, where he learned to surf and where his male parent oftentimes took him forth to practice sessions. The experience left him with a lifelong love of jazz; he after said he learned to write by listening to the "long, lapidary lines" of Chet Baker.
His father's California sojourn failed, and a few years after returning to Fort Worth, the elder Mr. Hickey took his own life. David's mother, Helen (Balch) Hickey, who worked in her family'south flower store and at nearby Texas Christian University, sent David to live with his maternal grandparents.
He enrolled at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, majoring in engineering and math, but later transferred to Texas Christian, where he graduated with a degree in English in 1961. He later pursued a Ph.D. in linguistics at the Academy of Texas, focusing on French post-structuralist theory, simply left in 1967 before completing his dissertation.
Instead, he and his married woman, Mary Jane (Taylor) Hickey, borrowed $x,000 to open up an fine art gallery in Austin, which they called A Clean Well-Lighted Identify, after the short story by Ernest Hemingway.
Image
Though the gallery lasted only two years, the experience gave Mr. Hickey a perspective on art every bit an object of commerce, its value determined by competing notions of beauty — an approach that would guide his views every bit a critic.
The Hickeys moved to New York, where Mr. Hickey briefly ran the Reese Palley Gallery in SoHo; he quit after his boss insisted on showing work by Yoko Ono, an artist he despised. A few years as the executive editor of Fine art in America introduced him to journalism, and after he stepped down from that job, he spent several years writing freelance articles for outlets similar the Village Vocalisation, Rolling Stone and Harper'south.
It was the era of New Journalism, dominated by big, brash personalities like Hunter South. Thompson and Lester Bangs, two writers Mr. Hickey counted as close friends. He mixed business and pleasure, partying with musicians similar Aerosmith and Waylon Jennings and building relationships with Mr. Warhol, Mr. Ruscha and other artists.
His rock 'n' roll lifestyle, with a side helping of sex and drugs, soon bankrupt upwardly his matrimony. He moved to Nashville, where he wrote songs for a music publisher and on the side for the singer-songwriter Marshall Chapman, whom he as well dated and for whom, on bout, he sometimes played rhythm guitar.
Eventually, the strain of hard living ground him downwardly, and in 1978 he returned to Fort Worth, where he lived with his mother and tried to get clean. He became the arts editor for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram and began to build a reputation every bit a serious vox in art criticism. In 1992 he moved to Las Vegas, and to academia.
Mr. Hickey took quickly to education, and to his new hometown. The urban center seemed to embody everything he dreamed of for a democratic civilisation — fine art galleries nestled abreast behemothic casino-hotels, opera singers trading stages with lion tamers, and all of it filtered through the hustle and hurry of commerce.
"Las Vegas is a take chances-oriented culture," he told The New York Times in 2002. "If y'all're not taking whatever chances, you're not having any fun."
He married Dr. Lumpkin in 1993. She taught alongside her married man at the Academy of Nevada, Las Vegas, for several years, and in 2010 they moved to the University of New Mexico and settled in Santa Fe.
Along with his wife, he is survived by his brother, Michael.
Facing health problems, Mr. Hickey retired from teaching in 2012. Merely he kept writing, including on Facebook. 2 edited collections of his posts, "Wasted Words" and "Dust Bunnies," appeared in 2016. Another volume, "25 Women: Essays on Their Art," also published in 2016, raised the eyebrows of those who withal viewed him as an unreconstructed male chauvinist.
And he continued to poke back at all the forces and institutions that he insisted had ruined the fine art world he had known every bit a younger man. He held identity politics in particular disdain, he told The Los Angeles Times in 2014, for dividing otherwise like-minded people into antagonistic categories.
"Identity politics tribalized the art surreptitious and broke up the anomalous tone of it — a tribe of women, a tribe of Black people, a tribe of gay people," he said. "It used to be all of the states, together, just downwards in the dirt."
0 Response to "The Art World Is the Last Unregulated Industry Libby Lumpkin"
إرسال تعليق