Who’s Afraid of Dave Hickey? Rereading ‘The Invisible Dragon,’ Three Decades Later  – The Village Voice

To paraphrase the late Dave Hickey — one-time Austin art dealer, Nashville lyricist, Art in America editor, roving music scribe, and Nevada-based MacArthur genius — I am certain of one thing: Images can change the world. Not infrequently, visuals alter the construction of common realities, revise the priorities of fragile consensuses, act as catalysts for social and political change, and, during relentlessly roiled periods like ours, provide turning points and hard pivots for ideas to alternately shrivel or flower. The effects of such images are not merely therapeutic, but catholic — from the original Greek, meaning “worldwide” and “all-inclusive.” To cite Hickey again: “Bad graphics topple good governments and occlude good ideas”; alternately, “Good graphics sustain bad ideas and worse governments.” (Think of the infamous tank photo that helped sink Michael Dukakis’s 1988 presidential campaign; that, and the SS uniforms designed by Hugo Boss.) 

Arriving at a point of simpatico with Hickey is no easy task for me — a meandering, look-at-me-now stylist, he frequently gets on my last nerve — but I recently found myself driven to a partial reappraisal of his gonzo writing. The previous citation is from his 1993 essay “Prom Night in Flatland” (its subtitle promises to noodle “On the Gender of Works of Art”; it not only fails to make its case but dismisses “the feminine” and “the masculine” as beards, or false premises). Like most of Hickey’s essays, the prose is buoyed by a love of showboating and the promise of common sense. In another essay, “The Empire of Talk,” published in Art Issues magazine in 1999, Hickey takes on footnoted, academic-style art writing, while self-describing as a “talk-in-type” sentence writer. Suffice it to say that no one talks like Hickey wrote. Three years after his death — he died of heart disease in 2021, at age 82 — Hickey’s pop nonconformism remains endearing; his slippery prose not so much. 

If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard monied artists dump on “woke” culture while mentioning Hickey, I’d have something besides undying love to give the NEA.

To paraphrase again, this time film critic Pauline Kael: People should read critics not for their judgments but for their insights. That formulation provides ample rationale to consider, or reconsider, Hickey, and what’s left of his legacy — which his NYT obit pegged as a defense of “beauty,” and Newsweek derided, however accidentally, by deploying his enduring moniker: “The Bad Boy of Art Criticism.” What to do, then, with Art Issues Press’s 2023 30th-anniversary reissue of The Invisible Dragon, the 1993 book that launched thousands of well-paid lectures on “the beautiful” and the PC terrors perpetrated by “guardians of public taste.” (An occasional journalist, I find that being late to the book review party keeps me from trampling on clichés.) To quote this bard of Las Vegas, one may admire the “subtlety and acuity” of his “insights into the vagaries of historical picture-making” — as he wrote about the art historian Michael Fried — “without buying into his critical agenda.” 

Agendas in art criticism today are a lot like the Democrats’ promise of a national wealth tax — nowhere. That, or they’ve become so farcical as to constitute Black Mirror–style alternate universes siloed by youthful privilege (the retread scene that is downtown’s Dimes Square) or, worse yet, grasping Instagram likes (I’m talking to you, Jerry Saltz). The collapse of journalism — jobs at magazines, newspapers, and weeklies like the Village Voice are down more than a quarter since 2008, and one study estimates that number to be likely to fall by another third by 2031 — proved a Chicxulub crater–like extinction event for cultural criticism, and art criticism especially. This is the scorched earth onto which Gary Kornblau, editor of the Invisible Dragon (the current and OG edition), redoubtable publisher of L.A.’s Art Issues Press, and quiet partner in the wildcat phenomenon that was author Dave Hickey, has recently ventured. The world has moved on since 1993 — becoming hopelessly technophilic, politically polarized, information-rich, and fact-free. The question hanging over Kornblau’s 2023 relaunch of Hickey — the editor added five essays to the book’s original four, and a lengthy afterword — is whether The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty and Other Matters matters today, at all, to anyone. 

Hickey, at the top of his game, was, in the words of rock critic Robert Christgau, “famous to a few.” Those happy few, clustered protectively around subgenres and subcultures during the mid-1980s and ’90s, were prone to mistake Shakespeare’s St. Crispin’s Day speech for Quentin Crisp. Amid the “culture wars,” epitomized by North Carolina senator Jesse Helms’s congressional denunciation of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s pictures of gay sex, said folks were excited by Hickey’s embrace of so-called “bad taste” (he loved him some Siegfried and Roy, Liberace, and, more sensibly, Richard Pryor); enthused by his privileging of encounters with artists rather than gatekeepers; and roused by his savaging of America’s milquetoast art establishment. Chief among that establishment’s sins was their sorry defense of Mapplethorpe’s “X Portfolio.” The nation’s cultural attachés’ appeals to “free speech” didn’t just miss the point of Mapplethorpe’s explicit transgressions, Hickey wrote in Dragon, it demoted them to a defense of “formal values.” This gave Mapplethorpe and his supporters — who got that the dying photographer wanted to change the world with images — a full view of “the art world for what it was.” Per Hickey’s lapidary judgment: “another closet.” 

Hickey said of Susan Sontag, “I would have taken her on, but she died.” 

Hickey’s resulting reformulation of “a loose confederation of museums, universities, bureaus, foundations, publications, and endowments” into “the therapeutic institution” became, in short order, the cudgel with which cultural conservatives beat the dead horse that is today’s pauperized government arts funding. (If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard monied artists dump on “woke” culture while mentioning Hickey, I’d have something besides undying love to give the NEA.) By decade’s end, Hickey spied art bureaucrats behind every stretcher bar. What he missed, of course, was their seat at the free market’s members-only art lounge — the club that trickles down coin to galleries, auction houses, and museums (MoMA, the Met, LACMA, et al.) as collectors, speculators, and trustees. Hickey protested way too much about art economies whose complexities he ignored. What’s more, he did so while citing reams of relativizing, power-obsessed theory that begat another Hickey bugaboo — political correctness. 

If coteries of art administrators turned the poet of gay sex into a sanitized free speech warrior — and they did — it must be noted that they did so rhetorically by citing the same obfuscating texts Hickey repeated, mostly unquestioningly. (In the essay The Great Tsunami, the wayward Texan makes a mess of his précis of “beauty — not what it is, but what it does” by parroting Gilles Deleuze’s postmodern tract “Coldness and Cruelty” for several excruciating pages.)

There were, to put it charitably, other inconsistencies that seriously diminish Hickey’s American grab bag of a weltanschauung (there is no instance I know about of Hickey really considering art beyond the American and European canon). In stewing up lashings of overcooked rhetoric and underbaked logic, the cowboy critic lumped together the following historical figures: genocidaire Joseph Stalin, “Reichminister für Volksaüfklarung und Propaganda” Joseph Goebbels, and ace formalist and rich-lady walker Alfred H. Barr, MoMA’s first director. According to Hickey’s QAnon–style fever dream, their efforts to establish national standards for art’s place in society — through realist agitprop, in the case of the first two, and New York school nonobjective formalism in the third — constituted “parallel agendas” designed to consolidate and activate “the powers of patronage to neutralize the power of contemporary images.” That troika’s ultimate goal: to push “the premise that art can be good for us.” Cue the infinite eye roll.

It’s frankly delicious to defer to Susan Sontag here. Hickey clumsily dissed her by declaring in a 2015 interview, WWE-wrestling-style, “I would have taken her on, but she died.” “Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course,” Sontag wrote, with whip-cracking acuity. “But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.”

Elsewhere, Hickey argued repeatedly and convincingly for beauty as the most effective Trojan horse for smuggling ideas into the unsuspecting noggins of specialists and lay people alike. The fact that he did so in ways that are profoundly moral, by my lights, stands him in fine stead — though I suspect he might have given such uncool praise the brush-off. According to Kornblau — who did heroic work wrangling the original Dragon from a procrastinating Hickey, along with a follow-up volume, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy — the purportedly “plain-talking” author refused to publish “Enter the Dragon,” the book’s lead essay, without the accompaniment of Mapplethorpe’s flagrant photos. When Dragon first saw the light of day, Kornblau did precisely that, reproducing Mapplethorpe’s Lou, NYC (1978), which depicts “jaffing,” or the finger-fucking of a male urethra, opposite Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1601), which features said saint jamming a dirty digit into Jesus’s wound. 

That image matchup still throws off sparks, as does the unruly mind that saw in that high-and-low encounter a through line of human experience across the ages. Hickey termed it, simply, precisely, and seductively, “the iconography of desire.”  ❖

Christian Viveros-Fauné has covered art and its intersections with politics for the Village Voice and other publications for more than 25 years.