The Politics of Beauty: The art world has turned into a celebrity-stoked social scene that has no use for serious art criticism
The Last Word Is Beauty - the Chronicle Review - the Chronicle of Higher Education
Everybody, it seems, is writing about Dave Hickey, but nobody’s really concentrating on the 74-year-old maverick art critic’s thorny, profound ideas about beauty. That is understandable. After decades of lambasting the academic side of the art world for institutionalizing mediocrity, and after recently proclaiming that the gallery-museum part of that world has turned into a venal, celebrity-stoked social scene that has no use for serious art criticism, Hickey has announced that he’s through with writing about contemporary art. Naturally, a flood of interviews and personality profiles has followed.
Of course, Hickey might not be telling the truth about giving up art criticism. He could be pulling a sneaky Marcel Duchamp nonwithdrawal-withdrawal. (After famously announcing that he was giving up art for chess, the godfather of Dada spent his last 20 years secretly creating the great peek-through-the-peephole installation “Étant donnés,” now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.)
As Hickey sails off into announced self-imposed exile from art criticism, he trails a lot of art-critical credentials in his wake. Not only was he awarded the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism (equivalent to an Oscar) in 1994, but he also entered the greater intellectual pantheon when he was awarded a MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 2001. And he’s topped off his long, long art critic’s CV with a catalog essay for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s retrospective of the great California ceramic sculptor Ken Price (the show will travel to Dallas and New York) and a book on female artists (tentatively titled, in typical Hickeyan fashion, Hot Chicks) that he’s now polishing up.