This passage epitomizes Hickey’s unusual relationship to literature and his uncanny ability to draw forward an aspect of a poem or novel to explicate an artwork without reducing either to mere illustration. Instead he sets off a chain reaction of implications at the level of feeling. While he does not shy away from Gober’s homosexuality, in evoking Great Expectations Hickey conjures a painful outsiderness, the plane where the artist and writer meet, all the while resisting any speculation on individual biography. It’s an extraordinarily sophisticated maneuver, one that doesn’t ascribe intention based on personal information but rather allows the art to express its deeper content.
A Proliferation of Beauties, Jarrett Earnest.
From nybooks on Hickey (1938 – 2021; artnet obituary), Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art by Daniel Oppenheimer, 2021; The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, Revised and Expanded, 2009; Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy by Dave Hickey, 1997.
… a finer point on his argument for “beauty,” “not what it is but what it does—its rhetorical function in our discourse with images,” leveling a critique against what we would now call the rise of the “professional managerial class” of art-world gatekeepers—the curators, critics, and academics who have disenfranchised audiences from the validity of their own experiences, judgments, and tastes. Hickey was not interested in “beauty” as an aesthetic or philosophical category, but rather in a “proliferation of beauties,” around which communities of desire congregate.
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Air Guitar embodies an attitude toward being alive in the world, one that abolishes distinctions between “high” and “low” cultures and aligns objects based on the quality of the response they elicit.
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Moving beyond the personal psychology or biography of an artist, the artwork extends an unlikely communion with other alienated people who have found that by making and thinking about something beautiful, they invoke a gentler, more exciting, and more livable society.
