ESSAY: Dave Hickey Resigns

Tim Bavington, Heart Above Head #1, a painter championed by Hickey

His (Dave Hickey’s) ideas as an art critic are incompatible with the art world's absorption in theory. 

Dave Hickey, the Art Market's self-appointed hygienist, retires after diagnosing himself with accidie.

Dave Hickey an art critic and professor of art theory living in Santa Fe after mostly Las Vegas (because he is a gambler?) announced recently he would write no more art criticism.  My reaction to this was ho-hum:  another one of the boys just picking up their bat and ball and going home, soured and burned out when his critical perspective finally came up short.  You’re 74, so just retire already, without having to use that endless supply of cynicism to grease the exit skids.

Hickey fought his generation’s worthy battle against mediocrity and academicism. You’d think he was the only one out there explaining with great gusts of iconoclasm and Whitman-esque vigor, how unbecoming are the Emperor’s clothes.  Yet he sheltered within academia, playing the rogue outsider in the system.  

I think Hickey’s role was to keep punching the dynamic to prevent entropy.  But the horse he rode in on, the fusion of pop and high culture, really has needed to be shot. And he remained compromised, because he really was an elitist, trapped by a sort of ornery appreciative nature.

 For the most part, widening art to include pop and vernacular art was simply a strategy to attract viewers.  I’m not sure that pop culture was and is anything more than shallow superficial reactionary escapism.  That really isn’t what art is all about, is it?  So why seek it out?  Because social reality is so disheartening:  who wants to serve democracy when they can be served a Big Mac instead?

Suspiciousness is a fault of mine; these gritty battlers debunking the system that feeds them - and what other kind of system would better serve art? The dynamics of purging commodity systems of mediocrity are built into it for our amusement and hygiene.  Mustn’t get suckered by all those sales pitches.  We are even amused by those who bite our hands as we feed them, indeed, seem to require it to maintain focus and attention.

I like it that Hickey is concerned with beauty.  Likely he is concerned with original thinking, too, as long as it’s clear and vigorous.  The older I become, the less I can defend popular culture.  It’s a familiar arc, n’est pas?  I do apologize for that.  But I was beguiled by the market’s and Post-Modernism’s great assertion that high and low culture had fused.  

  I don’t think I want much hi-lo fusion, anyway.  It’s simply more democratic mediocrity, with the majority tyranny of taste ruling.