The Critic: Dave Hickey

by Diane Russell

It might well have been midnight in a club somewhere in the snowy Rockies. The room was nearly dark as midnight – lighted only by small strips of neon and flames from a circular skilodge- type fireplace that would have been considered “hip” a few decades ago. In the adjacent conversation pit, a couple was engaged in a marathon make-out session, oblivious to other customers.

It might well have been midnight, but it wasn’t. It was one o’clock on a bright afternoon – at least outside. Inside the lounge of Las Vegas’ Peppermill restaurant, it was dead-of-night dark.

That time can be so easily altered is one of the things Dave Hickey – renowned art critic, author, UNLV professor, and certified genius (ask the folks at the MacArthur Foundation) – likes about the town he has called home for the last dozen years.

“Vegas is not the future. It’s the ’70s with valet parking. It’s got drinking and smoking and staying up late and 24-hour restaurants. If I want to stay up late, I can. And,” he says, gesturing around the dimly lit bar, “it can be midnight just for me.”

…

Having an adjustable “midnight” must be convenient for a man who once was a musician and clearly likes the after-hours mood, but who rises by 4 a.m. most days so that he can get the bulk of his writing done before the non-stop ringing of the phone in his apartment begins around 9 a.m.

The Texas-born Hickey has been writing – prolifically – for years. He has four books to his credit – Prior Convictions: Stories from the Sixties, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty, and the latest, Stardumb, a book illustrated by artist John deFazio. His essays, critiques, and short stories have appeared in virtually every American publication known for its cultural discourse, including Rolling Stone, Art in America (where he once was executive editor), Artforum, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times.

For the past 11 years, the former art gallery owner and Nashville songwriter has taught art criticism and theory at UNLV and has helped numerous students launch their careers.

During the fall semester, though, he took time off from his academic duties to concentrate on writing – helped by a $500,000, no-strings-attached grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Hickey is the first Nevadan to receive the foundation’s so-called “genius” grant.

According to the foundation, Hickey spurns ideological agendas and champions what some consider to be outmoded notions of beauty, artistic vision, and the virtues of the marketplace.

According to Hickey, while it’s flattering to receive such an honor – especially because recipients cannot apply for the grant, but instead are nominated by their peers – it’s best to be realistic about it. “It’s not ‘genius’ genius. It’s ‘art criticism genius,’” he corrects. “That’s a fairly small field, like being the best surfer in Montana.”

It’s lines like that that set Hickey apart, says author and UNLV English professor John Irsfeld.

“One of the things about David that endears him to me and to others, I think, is his gift for great lines. He has a direct connection to somewhere else that most of us don’t have, and he is free with that gift.

“One of my spies reported to me that recently, when David was in Texas at a symposium in San Marcos in honor of the writer John Graves, the conversation turned to presidential libraries. Lyndon Johnson’s was in Austin, at (the University of Texas), and they spoke of that. Someone then brought up the library of Bush the Younger, and wondered where it would be. ‘It will be a small one,’ David said, ‘since none of the books will go past chapter 11.’

“When someone asked him if that had come to him on the spur of the moment, he admitted it had. ‘It’s what I do,’ he is reputed to have said. That’s only a tiny part of what he does, of course, but a delightful part.”

Here, then, are some of Hickey’s thoughts on art, art criticism, Las Vegas, and a diversity of subjects.

On why he decided in college to pursue a career in art criticism rather than his original choice of literary criticism: The art world is more social and it’s more gregarious. Things look better, people dress better and stay up later. It’s not quite as seedy and tweedy.

On whether he is also an artist: No, I don’t think critics should be competitive with their subjects. Thus my distrust of literary criticism.

On what motivates people to become artists: Artists come out of the penthouse and out of the ghetto. They rarely come out of the suburbs. The art world, in fact, is mostly rich kids and poor kids. People who want the car and the house and the pool and everything don’t tend to be artists – they’ll become art professors, perhaps, or curators or arts administrators, but they don’t become artists.Most successful artists make a lot less than university professors do – and they don’t have health insurance.

On what art is: It’s what we call it. It’s a wildcard in the hand that culture deals us. So we decide what it is. The function of art changes from generation to generation. It does whatever needs to be done, if it’s any good. And what is the function of art in this generation? Hard to say. The general function of modern art is to reorganize society. In other words, works of art create constituencies of people who like it, and these constituencies are not bounded by race, color, creed, region, or religion, and so they create new modes of social organization. And it’s art’s ability to override these sorts of primitive tribal norms that is the thing that appeals to me the most.

On the most influential artists of the last century: Picasso, Pollock, Warhol.

On what excites him about art: I’m excited by the fact that some of it is exciting. It is one of the few places that you can see something new and weird and disorienting. Not always, but there’s always the possibility of something exciting. When people ask me what I want to see, I say, ‘I don’t know what I want to see. I want to be amazed.’ That’s my job. And is he amazed often? Pretty often. You know, more often than insurance adjustors. They’re probably more appalled than amazed.

On how the layperson views art: Your experience of art is based on your experience of other art. So if you don’t grow up around art and if you don’t take the trouble to acquire a repertoire of responses, it’s really hard to know what anything is when you see it because it’s always more or less than everything else. So it’s a completely relative and contingent discourse. It’s a classic ‘you had to be there’ activity. If you just accept the fact that the art world has never been particularly congenial to bourgeois sensibilities, it’s a fairly amazing democracy.

On people in the art world: The high art world is about people who love change and love adventure. Not many people like to be challenged. Not many people like to be threatened. It’s not a game for losers and not a game for sissies.

On success in the art world: You can be a successful artist even if everybody hates your work – if they hate it enough. Success in the art world has more to do with the sheer quantity of response from people who care than with authorized approval of the work.”

On why he gets so much work (Hickey doesn’t solicit writing assignments. The publications ask him.): Part of the reason that I work so much, and the reason that everybody my age who’s an art critic works so much, is that so many kids died in the ’80s with the AIDS epidemic. There’s a whole generation of art critics who are just dead. So, in a sense, I’m doing a lot of their work these days. AIDS just ravaged the art world – and as much in criticism as in anything else. In my generation, nearly everybody overdosed and, fortunately, I didn’t do that.

On why Las Vegas is not an odd place for someone who loves art to live: Las Vegas is a place that looks interesting. That’s a very good place for an artist. It’s about the physical. Vegas aspires to a condition of art. Not many places do.…Artists in Las Vegas are not the only people concerned with how it looks. In Ann Arbor,Mich., artists probably are the only ones who care how the city looks.

On why he abandoned his Nashville songwriting career: I decided at some point that I could be an A-plus art critic and only a B-plus songwriter. So I went with the higher grade. Unfortunately, I did that without ever thinking how much money a B-plus songwriter makes. I could be sitting in West Palm in my yacht. So much for genius.

On art critics: Art critics tend to be fairly eccentric.When two art critics agree, you’ve got one too many art critics.