His name means “hickey” in English, and when you read three lines of him he scarred you for life. Dave Hickey, one of America’s most controversial art critics, best known for two books published in the 90s (but never translated in France), Four Essays on Beauty and the most affordable (almost cult) Air Guitar, died November 12 at age 82 at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Texan by birth and temperament, he had opened an influential gallery in Austin in the 1960s which he called A Well Lighted Place (following the title of a short story by Hemingway), before running another in New York. He also stayed in Nashville, Tennessee for a while, writing songs for singers outlaw country (he would even have coined the term).
After ten years spent with his mother in Fort Worth to recover his health (destroyed by amphas and barbiturates), he had recreated himself as a fine arts teacher in Las Vegas, where he taught at the University of Nevada and s sometimes occupied the collections of billionaire Steve Wynn (who owns Renoirs, Picassos, Van Goghs, etc.). It was in one of his casinos, the Bellagio, that we met him to tell us regarding his old friend the journalist Grover Lewis, whom he had known since college in Fort Worth. He was no longer drinking and had eased off drugs, but he was still talking his feet down. During a three-hour lunch at Picasso, the restaurant at the Bellagio, he must have downed 12 espressos and smoked 20 Marlboro Lights 100s.
Hickey claimed to love Las Vegas. He liked gamblers and risk takers, just like in the art world. “You have to put your money where it catches your eye, you have to have faith in your own taste.” And also : “Bad taste is the real taste, of course; good taste is the residue of privilege.”
Born in 1939 in Fort Worth, Hickey grew up in Dallas, Louisiana and Southern California. His father was a frustrated jazz musician, and Hickey remembered nights at his house with Ornette Coleman or Art Pepper. He committed suicide when Dave Jr. was 16 (“With us, suicide was in the family…”). A graduate in linguistics, Dave Hickey was quick to take to the maquis and distance himself from the teachers. Not a prude, he might as well spend two weeks with Rod Stewart in a studio in Muscle Shoals (Alabama) as a month hanging out with Warhol or drinking with Rauschenberg. In his essays, he is like a cultural guide who mentions in the same article the connections between, for example, Jackson Pollock, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Dickens. The paper begins with Warhol and ends with the Rolling Stones. In this regard, his book Air Guitar. Essays on Art and Democraty, is a real cultural flipper, we go from Vélasquez to Robert Mitchum or Hank Williams. In an article entitled “Pontormo’s Rainbow”, he draws the parallel between discovering the Pacific Palisades district of Los Angeles and surfing following the gloom of Dallas, and his “rapture” by the colors of the Renaissance painter Pontormo, contained in the title; but the paper also speaks of Donald Duck and Vil Coyote, of Tom and Jerry, of Quincey and Djuna Barnes. Not to mention Ruskin.
Hickey certainly wrote the best article on Robert Mitchum, in Art Issues, which began: “Compared to Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda or Ronald Reagan, Mitchum was like a switchblade on a plate of petit fours.” He has also been called names by several female artists. His response: to publish a book entitled 25 Women, with essays on Elizabeth Peyton, Joan Mitchell, Alexis Smith or Karen Carson. “I wrote [mes essais] over a period of thirty years, but the only ones to be reprinted anywhere were of male painters.” He chuckled all the same: “These politics of identity tribalized the artistic underground and ended the dissonances that made it valid. […] Before, it was just all of us together, our ass in the dust.” Dave Hickey, 1938-2021, a treasure to be discovered.