Dave Hickey was a author. He wrote small tales, fiction and journalism — essays about Liberace, the mechanics of zone protection on the taking part in subject and what manufactured loud, brash, vulgar Las Vegas America’s most American metropolis.
From time to time he wrote about audio — state and rock ’n’ roll — and at times he wrote the music them selves. And he wrote about art, which is how I acquired to know him in the 1980s.
A lot of good individuals compose wise factors about artwork but no one was a greater author than Dave. Hickey died Nov. 12 at dwelling in Santa Fe, N.M., succumbing three weeks shy of his 83rd birthday immediately after a long and challenging struggle with coronary heart disease. He is survived by his wife, Libby Lumpkin, a feminist artwork historian and professor at the University of New Mexico, and a youthful brother, Michael, of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. (A sister, Sarah Henderson, predeceased him.)
Two publications printed by Art Concerns Press in Los Angeles stand at the leading of his creating heap. “The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty” (1993), a trim, smooth-deal with chapbook, shook up an art environment allergic to using very seriously the b-word, even nevertheless “beautiful” was a frequent exclamation in response to exhibitions of the most seemingly resistant conceptual art. “Air Guitar: Essays on Artwork and Democracy” (1997), a collection of 23 columns gathered from the publisher’s month to month magazine, applied the dragon’s fearsome breath to culture both of those large and pop.
However out there, eight printings and tens of hundreds of copies later on, “Air Guitar” is easily the most broadly read e-book of artwork criticism to show up in our time. Its lament resonates for artwork at the time noticed as a disputatious civic discussion board, now overrun by the difficult coin of investment marketplaces. The democracy part of “Air Guitar,” which presciently foretells a great deal of the political catastrophe in which we uncover ourselves currently, is usually forgotten.

Dave Hickey’s “Air Guitar: Essays on Artwork & Democracy” was released in 1997.
(Art Problems Press)
Hickey’s smarts very first acquired me fascinated in his operate. My introduction was his essay in the 1982 catalog for “I Really do not Want No Retrospective: The Will work of Edward Ruscha,” a touring exhibition from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His essay created paintings that I liked intelligible in plainspoken, even evident methods that the essential baggage of Significant Art pretensions had hitherto obscured. The vernacular was fantastic enough — for the artist and the art critic.
But it was the new music in his writing that retained me likely. Hickey, a outstanding and cantankerous wit, wrote for the ear. His operate wanted examining, not scanning, and rewarded hard work with pleasure.
He was conversant with arcane philosophical treatises (his deserted 1967 PhD dissertation in linguistics at the College of Texas at Austin concerned critiques of Jacques Derrida and French structuralism). But, with all thanks regard, he located the iconoclastic concision of Waylon Jennings’ outlaw lyrics and the publish-doo-wop generate of George Clinton and the Parliament-Funkadelic collective far more successful than the hothouse concept flourishing in educational journals.
He had uncovered to enjoy portray from his normally distant mom, Helen, a businesswoman and novice artist, and he inhaled the intricacies of tunes from his jazz-musician father, David, a automobile salesman who tragically died by his have hand when Hickey was 11. If art was to be noticed, then creating, like a music, was to be heard. No marvel he could illuminate the work of Ruscha — an artist of painted language, overheard.
Hickey could be detailing the gentle sensuality and unique drift of his childhood move as a kid from Texas (he was born in Fort Worthy of), transported with family for a 12 months to the beach front in Los Angeles, and interject into his crafting the question of a landscape dotted with “coco palms.” Those are tropical trees, of course, not imports identified at the Southern California seashore. But if the tale essential to convey the bewildered bemusement of youthful dislocation, moreover the sonic motor of a silly rat-a-tat provided by a challenging-c repetition to go issues along, so be it. Coco palms in Pacific Palisades it was.
50 percent a dozen several years passed following looking at the Ruscha essay just before I satisfied him. Invited to communicate on a panel in Texas, I acknowledged only since Hickey was scheduled as a area panelist.
By then I was filling in the back again story. Considering that the late 1960s, he’d operate A Thoroughly clean Nicely-Lighted Spot, a limited-lived but famous Austin artwork gallery moved to New York and been director at Soho’s groundbreaking Reese Palley Gallery turn into executive editor of Art in The us, the place he also wrote carried out a stint composing and selling tunes in Nashville created for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice (“He’s as excellent as it will get, starting off with his prose,” in the text of estimable Voice rock critic Robert Christgau) and, somewhere along the way, burned out on amphetamines and gone back again property to dwell with Mom in Fort Value to cleanse out. (He changed speed’s superior-wattage thrust with a white-knuckle cocktail of nonstop nicotine and caffeine.) The Texas panel remains hazy to me — was it Houston? Dallas? — but the boisterous showmanship of his riveting perception was evidently part of Dave’s reemergence from self-imposed isolation.
When I obtained back again to L.A., coincidence happened: Gary Kornblau, whom I understood in passing from his occasional entrance-desk responsibility at Margo Leavin Gallery in West Hollywood, questioned if he could bounce an idea off me for a journal from art-prosperous, criticism-lousy Southern California. Confident, I reported — and there is this guy in Texas you really should publish.
The fit concerning Hickey as author and Kornblau as editor at Artwork Troubles proved to be suitable — which is not to say quick. A deadline for Dave was an exceptional excuse to procrastinate, only to rev up to hyper-velocity at (or immediately after) the previous minute and then, in editorial session, to hone the essay’s songs.

Dave Hickey’s “The Invisible Dragon: 4 Essays on Beauty” was released in 1993
(Art Challenges Press)
The “Dragon” chapbook emerged as an intellectually formidable statement of the critic’s performing philosophy. The timing could not have been far more volatile. The roaring, Reaganite 1980s market getting collapsed into deep recession, id politics experienced moved into the artwork-environment foreground. The institutional bureaucracies of museums and artwork educational facilities that had developed up with it collected the politics into a restricted embrace. That was fantastic with Dave — with just one big caveat. A work of artwork, he argued, does not depict a monolithic neighborhood.
Alternatively, he insisted, the best art makes assorted community — a free and open kinship of people today attracted to it, now and in the long run. That shared attraction among the dissimilar but engaged individuals was the “beauty” aspect. Natural beauty was an expression of variegated wishes, not a factor.
To these not paying consideration, Hickey’s claim was obtained as an anachronistic, reactionary affront. The mistaken assumption was that splendor was remaining sophisticated as an essential characteristic held within specified identifiable objects — what was identified in the hoary past as “the gorgeous,” a marker of aristocratic style enforced by privileged elites. The mistake was even hoisted aloft in an inept UCLA symposium sarcastically, if revealingly, titled “On the Unappealing.”
“Air Guitar” was the selection that spoke most eloquently of Hickey’s transfer to Las Vegas, where by he assumed a instructing put up at the College of Nevada (with each other with going to professorships at Harvard College and L.A.’s Otis Faculty of Artwork and Style). He commenced building of some thing unprecedented — a compact but lively neighborhood group of artists and art individuals.
He experienced found an opening. Las Vegas, he wrote, was a town blessedly “bereft of dead white walls, grey wool carpets, Ficus plants and Barcelona chairs,” the institution home furniture of an institution artwork planet that was colonizing every single world continent. By some means, the boring conformity had skipped a flashy desert watering gap “where there is everything to see and not a single pretentious item demanding to be scrutinized.”
For reliable artwork, the city’s Ur-object defining a perception of probability and question was the world’s major rhinestone, proudly displayed at the Liberace Museum.
When the welcoming people today at Chicago’s John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation questioned me to quietly nominate somebody for the 2001 installment of their yearly “genius grant,” a millennium applicant was apparent. Hickey was the closest issue to that vanishing breed — a public intellectual — that America’s vain planet of visual art could claim. I wrote an absurdly lengthy but productive suggestion, emphasizing that the grant would reflect magnificently on the foundation, not the receiver, because every person now knew he was a genius.
Subsequent the MacArthur accolade, he proceeded to deposit most of the fifty percent-million-dollar prize into video clip poker machines on and off the Strip. The virtuoso artist Robert Irwin could shift to Vegas in the 1980s and grow to be an accomplished specialist gambler to assistance himself, since the splendid artwork he produced could not. Dave, having said that, experienced creating to generate his preserve. As a punter devoted to novice standing, he knew the home would generally win, but he wanted to know the game.
The video game is in excess of now, despite the fact that we have at the very least just one much more Hickey rumination to glance ahead to. Libby Lumpkin told me that, in excess of the summer season, Dave finished a prolonged piece on Michael Heizer, the reclusive Nevada sculptor who has expended the final 50 yrs setting up a colossal fortress of mud and concrete called “City” in the midst of a harsh desert-nowhere. I picture elegance is concerned, and I cannot wait around to browse it.
Hickey will be buried Nov. 30, at 1 p.m., at Rosario Cemetery in Santa Fe. Every person is welcome.