Dave Hickey
Based on Wikipedia: Dave Hickey
The Bad Boy Who Loved Beauty
"I write love songs for people who live in a democracy."
That's how Dave Hickey described his life's work. It's a strange thing for an art critic to say—most critics write analysis, or theory, or takedowns. But Hickey wasn't most critics. He was, by his own account and everyone else's, the enfant terrible of American art criticism, a man who spent decades arguing that beauty matters, that markets can be liberating, and that the art world had gotten everything exactly backwards.
He died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in November 2021, at eighty-two years old. But to understand why anyone would call an art critic a "bad boy," you have to understand what he was fighting against.
The Academy and Its Discontents
By the late twentieth century, the American art world had developed a peculiar allergy to beauty. This wasn't accidental. It was ideological.
The thinking went something like this: beauty is dangerous because it seduces. It makes you feel good about things you should question. Beautiful art is politically suspect—it papers over injustice, lulls you into complacency, serves the interests of the powerful. The serious artist, therefore, should make difficult work. Challenging work. Work that confronts you with uncomfortable truths rather than pleasing your eye.
Universities embraced this view enthusiastically. So did museums, galleries, and grant-giving organizations. If you wanted institutional support, you learned to speak a certain language—one heavy on theory, light on pleasure.
Hickey thought this was nonsense. Worse than nonsense—he thought it was anti-democratic.
A Texas Education
He came from Fort Worth. Graduated from Texas Christian University in 1961, got his master's from the University of Texas two years later. These biographical details matter because Hickey never lost his Texas voice—direct, funny, profane, unimpressed by pretension.
Before he became a famous critic, he did a little of everything. He ran an art gallery in Austin called A Clean Well-Lighted Place (the name borrowed from Hemingway, of course). He directed the Reese Palley Gallery in New York. He wrote songs for a Nashville publishing company. He served as arts editor for his hometown newspaper, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
He even published a book of short fiction in 1989.
This scattered résumé wasn't a sign of indecision. It was training. Hickey was learning how culture actually works—not in the seminar room, but in the places where people buy and sell things, where they listen to music on the radio, where they flip through magazines waiting for the dentist.
The Invisible Dragon
In 1993, Hickey published a slim book called The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty. It made him famous, or at least as famous as an art critic can get.
The title refers to an old idea: that beauty is a kind of dragon guarding the treasure of meaning. You can't get to the deep stuff without first encountering the dragon. But contemporary art had decided to pretend the dragon didn't exist—to sneak around it, or declare it irrelevant, or insist that acknowledging beauty was somehow naive.
Hickey argued that this was a catastrophic mistake. Beauty isn't a trick or a distraction. It's the thing that makes you stop and look in the first place. Without it, art becomes a homework assignment—something you're supposed to appreciate rather than something you actually want to see.
He put it bluntly: if you make art that only specialists can understand, don't be surprised when ordinary people stop caring about art.
Democracy and the Rough-and-Tumble Market
Here's where Hickey really scandalized the art world: he defended the market.
This requires some context. In academic art discourse, "the market" is usually a villain. It corrupts artists, reduces everything to commerce, privileges what sells over what matters. The only protection against market forces, in this view, is institutional support—museums, universities, government grants.
Hickey saw it exactly the other way around.
He argued that markets are democratic in a way institutions never can be. When ordinary people buy art—or concert tickets, or books, or records—they're voting with their wallets. They're saying: this matters to me. Institutions, by contrast, are run by gatekeepers. Experts decide what's important, and everyone else is supposed to accept their judgment.
The rough-and-tumble market, with all its chaos and vulgarity, at least gives power to regular people. The museum tells you what to admire. The market asks you what you actually like.
This was heresy. Still is, in many quarters.
Air Guitar
In 1997, Hickey published Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy, a collection of twenty-three pieces he called "love songs." The book is part memoir, part criticism, part meditation on American culture. It covers Las Vegas, Norman Rockwell, Perry Mason, and the way a great painting can change your life.
The title essay is about playing air guitar—pretending to shred along with a record, eyes closed, lost in the music. Hickey saw this as a model for experiencing art. You're not analyzing. You're not performing expertise. You're just responding, bodily and emotionally, to something beautiful.
Critics aren't supposed to admit they do this. They're supposed to maintain professional distance, to explain rather than participate. Hickey thought this was cowardice. If a painting doesn't make you want to play air guitar—metaphorically speaking—what's the point?
Las Vegas and the Professoriate
For years, Hickey taught at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The appointment was perfect in a way that's almost too neat.
Las Vegas is the anti-academic city. It's gaudy, commercial, unapologetically devoted to pleasure. The architecture exists to seduce you. The lights are designed to keep you awake and spending. Nothing about Vegas pretends to be improving or educational.
Hickey loved it. He saw Vegas as honest in a way that cultural institutions rarely are. It admits that it wants your money and your attention. It competes for both by trying to give you a good time. Compare this to the museum, which claims to be above such crass considerations while quietly depending on donors and grants and the whole apparatus of elite patronage.
Later, he moved to the University of New Mexico, where he was a distinguished professor of criticism. But he remained associated with Vegas—the professor who lived among the casinos, the intellectual who'd rather hang out with gamblers than curators.
Twenty-Five Women
One persistent criticism of Hickey's work was that he celebrated a canon of mostly male artists. He addressed this directly in 2016 with 25 Women: Essays on Their Art, a collection of pieces he'd written over twenty years about female artists including Joan Mitchell, Bridget Riley, Fiona Rae, Lynda Benglis, and Karen Carson.
These weren't tokenistic gestures. Hickey wrote about these artists the same way he wrote about anyone—with passion, directness, and a refusal to treat their work as representative of anything other than individual genius.
Joan Mitchell painted abstract expressionist canvases of extraordinary energy and color. Bridget Riley made Op Art—optical art—paintings that seem to vibrate and pulse as you look at them. Lynda Benglis is famous for, among other things, a 1974 advertisement in Artforum in which she appeared nude, holding a large dildo, parodying the machismo of male artists.
These are not timid artists. Hickey wasn't interested in timid artists.
The Facebook Years
In 2014, Hickey got sick. And, like many people facing illness in the age of social media, he started posting on Facebook.
What happened next was remarkable. Hickey's posts—combative, funny, sprawling, sometimes cruel—attracted an enormous following. He'd blast away at "digital natives," at contemporary art, at whatever annoyed him that day. His followers responded with nearly seven hundred thousand words of comments. It was a kind of public performance, the critic as entertainer, conducted from a sickbed.
Art historian Julia Friedman saw something valuable in this chaos. She proposed documenting the whole exchange, and two books resulted: Wasted Words, the complete transcript, and Dust Bunnies, a curated selection of Hickey's aphorisms. Both appeared in 2016.
The Times Literary Supplement reviewed them at length. Here was something new: a major critic conducting his final performance in public, on a platform designed for baby photos and political arguments.
The MacArthur and Other Honors
In 2001, the MacArthur Foundation gave Hickey a fellowship—the so-called "genius grant." It's one of the most prestigious awards in American intellectual life, a recognition that someone's work matters beyond their immediate field.
He'd already won the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism in 1994, the highest honor from the College Art Association. In 2003, Nevada inducted him into its Writers Hall of Fame. In 2006, he won a Peabody Award for a documentary about Andy Warhol that aired on the PBS series American Masters.
These awards matter because they show that Hickey wasn't just a provocateur. The establishment he criticized recognized him as one of the most important voices in his field. You can be an enfant terrible and still be taken seriously—if you're good enough.
War Is Beautiful
In 2015, David Shields published a book called War Is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict. The title is ironic. Shields had collected war photographs from the Times that he found troublingly aestheticized—images that made combat look more like art than atrocity.
Hickey wrote the essay for this book, explaining the painterly influences behind these photographs. How does a war photographer compose a shot? What visual traditions is he—usually he—drawing on? Why do certain images of violence look beautiful, and what does it mean that we find them beautiful?
This was classic Hickey territory: taking beauty seriously as a force, even when—especially when—it shows up in uncomfortable contexts.
The Widow and the Legacy
Hickey was married to Libby Lumpkin, an art historian. They were intellectual partners as much as spouses, part of a generation of critics and scholars who actually talked to each other about ideas over dinner.
When Hickey died, he left behind a body of work that remains controversial. His defense of beauty has become more mainstream—you hear echoes of it whenever someone complains that contemporary art is ugly or alienating. But his defense of markets remains scandalous in academic circles.
Maybe that's appropriate. Hickey never wanted to be respectable. He wanted to be right, and he wanted to be entertaining, and he wanted art to matter to people who'd never set foot in a museum.
What He Was For
It's easy to describe what Hickey was against: academicism, institutional gatekeeping, the banishment of beauty from serious art discourse. But what was he for?
He was for pleasure. For the immediate, visceral response to a painting or a song or a neon sign in the desert. He was for ordinary people trusting their own reactions instead of deferring to experts. He was for art that you want to look at, not art that you're supposed to appreciate.
He was for democracy—not just as a political system, but as an attitude. The belief that your opinion matters as much as the critic's, that the market's judgment is as valid as the curator's, that beauty belongs to everyone and not just the credentialed few.
These are fighting words in some quarters. They were meant to be.
The Books
If you want to read Hickey, start with Air Guitar. It's the most accessible, the funniest, the most like sitting in a bar while a brilliant talker holds forth.
Then read The Invisible Dragon, especially the expanded 2012 edition, which includes Hickey's reflections on how the art world had changed in the two decades since the original. It's harder going—more theoretical—but essential if you want to understand his arguments about beauty.
Pirates and Farmers, from 2013, collects his shorter pieces from the previous fourteen years, covering the rise of mega-collectors, the proliferation of international art fairs called biennales, and what he saw as the decline of genuine looking—of people actually paying attention to art instead of consuming it as cultural commodity.
Perfect Wave, from 2017, continues in the same vein. More essays, more love songs, more attempts to remind people why art matters.
And then there are the Facebook books, if you're curious about what a dying critic sounds like when he's got nothing left to lose.
The Voice
What made Hickey distinctive wasn't just his ideas. It was his voice.
Academic art criticism tends toward the abstract and the impersonal. Hickey wrote like he was talking to you. He used profanity. He told stories. He admitted when he'd been wrong. He named names.
This voice came from those early years—the songwriting in Nashville, the newspaper editing in Fort Worth, the gallery-running in Austin. He'd learned to communicate with people who didn't have art history degrees, and he never forgot the lesson.
It's the reason his work survives. Long after the theoretical fashions of the nineteen-nineties have faded, people still read Hickey because he's fun to read. He's persuasive not just because he's smart, but because he's entertaining.
That was part of his point. Art should be entertaining. Criticism should be entertaining. If you can't make your case in language that gives pleasure, you probably don't have much of a case.
The Dragon, Visible
So what happened to the invisible dragon?
It's more visible now than it was in 1993. Beauty has made a comeback, at least in art-world discourse. Young artists and critics are less embarrassed to talk about pleasure, about visual delight, about work that actually rewards looking.
How much of this is Hickey's influence? Hard to say. Ideas spread in mysterious ways. But he was one of the loudest voices insisting that the dragon was real, that beauty wasn't a distraction from meaning but the path to it.
He was also one of the funniest. And in the end, that might matter as much as being right.