2021-11-23 08:00:00
His name means “hickey” in English, and when you read three lines from him he marked 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 more affordable (almost cult) Air Guitar, is died on November 12 at age 82, in his home in Santa Fe (New Mexico). A Texan by birth and temperament, he opened an influential gallery in Austin in the 1960s that he called A Well Lighted Place (following the title of a Hemingway short story), before running another in New York. He also lived in Nashville, Tennessee for a time, writing songs for outlaw country singers (he even coined the term).
After ten years spent with his mother in Fort Worth rebuilding his health (destroyed by amphitheaters and barbiturates), he 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 Renoir, Picasso, Van Gogh, etc.). It was in one of his casinos, the Bellagio, that we met him so he might tell us regarding his old friend the journalist Grover Lewis, whom he had known since university in Fort Worth. He no longer drank and had eased off on drugs, but he still talked his talk. During a three-hour lunch at Picasso, the Bellagio restaurant, he must have downed 12 espressos and smoked 20 Marlboro Lights 100s.
Hickey claimed to love Las Vegas. He loved high rollers and risk takers, just like in the art world. “You have to put your money where your mouth is, you have to have faith in your own taste.” And also: “Bad taste is 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 evenings at his house with Ornette Coleman and Art Pepper. He committed suicide when Dave Jr. was 16 (“In our house, suicide ran in the family…”). A graduate in linguistics, Dave Hickey was quick to go underground and distance himself from teachers. Not a stutterer, he might just as easily 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 Democracy, is a real cultural flipper, we go from Velázquez to Robert Mitchum or Hank Williams. In an article entitled “Pontormo’s Rainbow”, he draws a parallel between discovering the Pacific Palisades neighborhood in Los Angeles and surfing following the gray of Dallas, and his “delight” by the colors of the Renaissance painter Pontormo, content in the title; but the paper also talks regarding Donald Duck and Vile Coyote, Tom and Jerry, Quincey and Djuna Barnes. Not forgetting 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 petits fours.” He was also called names by several female artists. Her answer: publish a book called 25 Women, with essays on Elizabeth Peyton, Joan Mitchell, Alexis Smith and Karen Carson. “I wrote [mes essais] over a period of thirty years, but the only ones to be reprinted anywhere were by male painters.” He grumbled all the same: “These identity policies have tribalized the artistic underground and put an end to the dissonances that made it valid. […] Before, it was just us all together, ass in the dust.” Dave Hickey, 1938-2021, a treasure to discover.
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