It’s All in What You See

The insistent telephone keeps on ringing.

First it’s an artist, an old friend in Texas just wanting to schmooze. Then another artist, calling from New York, hoping for feedback on a recent installation. Next, a curator in the Southwest inquiring about the E.T.A. of an essay for a museum catalog whose deadline looms. Then the artist about whom the catalog is being written, wanting to clarify a critical point. Then an editor in L.A., checking on another essay in progress.

At each ring, Dave Hickey gets up from the dining room table, where he’s talking with a visitor, and answers the call with equanimity, promising to call back later. Outside the sliding glass doors of his apartment living room, nine stories above the desert floor, the temperature at 10 a.m. is creeping past 99 degrees. A beige blanket of heat-dancing smog hovers over the dusty clutter of gambling palaces, strung out like bright bijoux along the Strip.

Such is a typical day for one of the busiest, most prominent American art critics of the 1990s--an art critic who lives, contentedly if with seeming incongruity, in a Las Vegas high-rise rather than a metropolitan center associated with the avid pursuit of High Culture. Notwithstanding Hickey’s position as professor of art criticism and theory at the University of Nevada campus a few blocks away, Vegas probably doesn’t register first when influential art criticism comes to mind.

“I like Las Vegas a lot,” the affable, elegantly bluff writer offers in casual defense of his adopted hometown, heavy traces of his native Texas drawing out the vowels. “Mostly because there’s not much vertical social structure here. Any time I’m living in a town where I’ve met the mayor, there is not much vertical social structure! Know what I mean?”

An antipathy toward “vertical social structure” might be said to be a cornerstone of Hickey’s endlessly fascinating position as an art critic, one that has elevated him to the ranks of the most sought-after writers and lecturers on art in the country today. A small-d democrat to his marrow, he hasn’t much patience with aristocratic notions of High Culture, which thrive on traditional ideas of exclusivity.

For him, art is magical precisely for its stunning--and stunningly useful--capacity to reorganize the audience.

When art is doing its job, he believes, it creates motley, heterogeneous communities of admirers, who happily cross rigid boundaries based on class--or on race, gender or any of the other much-discussed categories of modern identity. And American society, with its resilient democratic premises, is where this hopeful phenomenon can blossom.

That basic idea circulates through the 23 remarkable essays in Hickey’s eagerly anticipated new book, “Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy” (Art issues Press, 216 pages, $17.95). In prose as entertaining as its often unexpected cultural subjects--Liberace, Chet Baker, professional basketball, Andy Warhol, magicians Siegfried and Roy, Norman Rockwell, Perry Mason--he ventures out into the vernacular landscape of late-20th century America in order to illuminate the odd relationship we now have to art.

“Air Guitar,” in bookstores this week, is a sequel of sorts to “The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty,” a slim volume that suddenly seized the national stage in 1993 and catapulted Hickey to the forefront of critical discourse. The book led with the startling assertion that, for art, “The issue of the ‘90s will be beauty.” And so it has been, created by Hickey’s audacious writing.

In an art world wearied by furious battles over censorship, fractious identity politics, an art market collapse and declining sources of public and private funding, his left-field argument about beauty as a pressing issue carried the force of shock.

It spawned symposiums, special sections of art magazines and exhibitions, from the 1995 Whitney Biennial to “Beauty and the Beast” at Paris’ Museum of Modern Art. In the four years since its publication, Hickey has toiled in overdrive, writing essays for 23 exhibition catalogs and dozens of magazines, commuting to Harvard, UC Santa Barbara and Rice University for visiting professorships and lecturing at nearly 60 museums, art schools and colleges around the nation. He also pocketed the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism, the highest award in the field.

All this from a 64-page paperback--a chapbook, really--published by the L.A. small-press, Art issues. “The Invisible Dragon,” now in its fourth printing, has sold more than 8,000 copies--unheard of for a small-press book of art criticism.

Its ubiquity, however, is marked by an inescapable irony: Loved or hated, the book has been widely misinterpreted.

Typical was a lame attack in last spring’s Art Journal, the stodgy publication of the nation’s largest professional academic organization, the College Art Assn. The head of a cultural studies program at a small Midwestern design school blubbered on for pages against the pernicious return of aesthetics to critical prominence.

Similarly, the art department at UCLA sponsored a spring lecture series, dominated by establishment art figures, whose pointed title was “On the Ugly.” In tired counterculture fashion, the potential for the opposite of “the beautiful” was hailed.

There’s just one Emily Litella-style hitch: “The Invisible Dragon” was neither a call for a return to aesthetics, as Art Journal erroneously believed, nor a paean to the forgotten charms of the beautiful, as UCLA seemed to assume.

“I didn’t attend the lectures,” Hickey says of the UCLA series, “but as far as I can tell the idea was that ‘the ugly’ is good for you.” And that, he quietly chortles, is at least as silly as the creaky claim that “the beautiful” is good for you.

“Beauty is an attribute of response, not an attribute of objects,” he explains, pinpointing the fundamental error made by most detractors--and even many supporters--of his book. “Objects that elicit a response that makes people think the objects are beautiful thus create a category of people--people who think something is beautiful.”

Beauty, in other words, is a rhetorical effect; it is not some essential element that characterizes a person, place or thing.

“The same principle applies to quality,” he continues, “which is another category of response and not an attribute of objects.”

Hickey sought to put this classical idea back into circulation in the belief that art could perform a vital function in American society, whose awesome diversity is unprecedented. A pragmatist in the manner of historian Daniel Boorstin or philosopher C.S. Peirce, he believes that a “democracy of objects,” as Warhol called it, might suggest a way out of the balkanized territory of today’s cultural life.

“What does art do?” he asks, answering his own question by reversing a usual assumption. “What art does is create an art world--although most people mistakenly think it happens the other way around, that the art world creates art. And insofar as the art world is part of all other worlds, it has social consequence.”

He elaborates by citing the big, brightly colored Pop pictures of flowers in a grassy field that Warhol cribbed in 1964 from a dumb advertising photograph he found in a commercial seed catalog.

“I thought they were great,” Hickey enthuses. “Those paintings were the opposite of anything anybody ever told me to like. They didn’t have one single signifier of artistic quality!

“But the fact that I loved those pictures created the world that I lived in when I came into the art world--because Peter Schjeldahl liked them, Ed Ruscha liked them, Stephen Mueller liked them. It was always a great thing to discover someone else that liked those particular paintings. It created a community.

“That’s how art changes the world. It reorganizes the society into communities of desire.”

This is more than just a matter of confirming what already resides in the eye of the beholder. As he writes in “Simple Hearts,” one of the loveliest essays in the new “Air Guitar,” Hickey believes works of art “might redeem isolation . . . by creating about them a confluence of simple hearts, a community united not in what they are--not in any cult of class, race, region or ideology--but in the collective mystery of what they are not and now find embodied before them.”

Hickey apparently came to this unshakable faith through necessity. Born in Fort Worth in 1940, he attended 13 different grammar schools, from Shreveport to Santa Monica.

His father was a jazz musician who, during the Second World War, was employed for the government setting up parts-distribution warehouses in the South and West, and who continued in that line of work for private companies after 1945. His mother, whom he describes as “a part-time Marxist” in her social outlook, was a small-businesswoman and college teacher.

“I had a terrible childhood,” he recalls, chain-smoking cigarettes and fidgeting with a copy of Pauline Maier’s book “American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence,” which rests on the table before him. “We moved around all the time. So books and movies and all that become instruments by which you orient yourself.”

Hickey studied literature and linguistics, first at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, then at the University of Texas, Austin, bailing out in 1967 just before completing his doctoral dissertation. Convinced that his thesis ran counter to the academic status quo and would never be accepted, he plunged instead into the world of small business, like his parents and grandparents before him. Only, given the conviviality of youth and lots of artist-friends, an art gallery was his choice of enterprise.

Austin’s A Clean Well-Lighted Place, named after a Hemingway story, operated on a shoestring for 3 1/2 years. Although segments of a newly booming art world were beginning to be skeptical of the market, being an art dealer convinced Hickey that mercantile virtues could apply to art.

After closing the Austin gallery and a brief stint as director of Reese Palley Gallery in New York, where he showed the Pop-inspired work of painters Scott Grieger and Elaine Sturtevant, Hickey became executive editor at Art in America under Brian O’Dougherty. A year or so later he quit the magazine--and the art world too.

“The fun was going out of it,” he recalls of the early 1970s, when art’s economic engine got retooled.

Recession, coupled with changes in federal tax law, stalled the flourishing commercial art market. Meanwhile President Nixon was vastly enlarging the National Endowment for the Arts, in a clever attempt to at once blunt the adversarial edge likely from contemporary artists while also satisfying a snobbish Republican constituency, who dominated the boardrooms of American cultural institutions but didn’t much like Dick.

So Hickey switched allegiance to his other love--popular music--and spent the next several years writing about rock ‘n’ roll for the Village Voice and Rolling Stone. In 1977 he moved to Nashville to become rhythm guitarist for the Marshall Chapman Band and then staff songwriter for Glaser Publications.

“Finally,” Hickey says of the hard-working, fast-playing times that characterized his music years, “I got walking pneumonia and went back to Fort Worth.”

He didn’t reemerge in the art world until 1982, when he was invited to write a museum catalog essay for a retrospective of paintings by Ruscha, an artist high in his personal pantheon. I met him five years later, when we both participated in a public art symposium at UT Austin; a friendship ensued. He relocated in 1992 to Las Vegas, where he lives with his art historian wife, Libby Lumpkin.

Then, “The Invisible Dragon” was let loose.

If Hickey made beauty the art issue of the early 1990s, “Air Guitar” might well make commerce the hot topic for the decade’s end.

“Art is not a commodity,” the text baldly declares on page 108--serendipitously, the book’s exact midpoint. Building on incisive ideas introduced by revered independent scholar Jane Jacobs in her arresting 1993 book, “Systems of Survival: A Dialog on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics,” Hickey deftly demonstrates that art is instead a form of currency, subject to rituals of commerce.

An art object is like money, he writes: “When you trade a piece of green paper with a picture on it, signed by a bureaucrat, for a piece of white paper with a picture on it, signed by an artist, you haven’t bought anything, since neither piece of paper is worth anything. You have [instead] translated your investment and your faith from one universe of value to another.”

Art might be currency, in other words, but it’s not a commodity, like corn or cars, as legions of critics today casually assume. In the wake of his dozen-page essay, reams of academic critiques of art’s supposed commodity status quietly evaporate, like puddle-mirages on a desert highway.

A solid marriage between skeptical regard and persuasive writing is a pretty good sign of meaningful art criticism. The happy couple are everywhere in Hickey’s work.

Yet, before it’s anything else, “Air Guitar” is a collection of great stories, told with wit and felicity. Hickey is a kind of songwriter-critic: He writes musically. As your eye scans his pages, your ear hears the melody of his words and your breath follows their rhythm.

His book’s title plainly celebrates the joys of amateur enthusiasms. Each story is a fable without the animals, complete with a pungent moral lesson about art. The best can leave you stunned.

“Pontormo’s Rainbow,” for one, focuses on childhood experiences of kiddie cartoons--Tom & Jerry, Donald Duck, the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote--in order to disrupt the fashionable conviction that art functions most powerfully as representation. Pointing out that pictures often represent something other than what you expect, Hickey extols the visceral, extra-linguistic sensuality of a huge silver screen transformed into a wall of vibrant, moving color.

What we want to see represented, he insists, is a separate issue from what we love to see.

The essay “Frivolity and Unction” maintains that, for the dubious purpose of maintaining public patronage, today’s art world has erected an awesome edifice of public virtue for art. So, rather than a lively art world of contested values, much art today is just a lackluster dramatization of good intentions.

Most of the essays began life in a column the critic still writes for L.A.’s Art issues. magazine, although all have been extensively rewritten and expanded for the book. Still, Hickey has nurtured some of these ideas for 25 years. Look up “Earthscapes, Landworks and Oz,” a fascinating article he published in Art in America in 1971, for an early primer on “Air Guitar” and its up-to-the-minute passions.

Perhaps the most startling feature of the book, however, is the form its essays take: a partial memoir of the author’s life. As often as not these stories begin with his itinerant youth.

Hickey means to narrate his own experience of art--whether a landscape by Cezanne, a television episode of “Perry Mason,” a Hank Williams song or a painting of a rough-hewn saint by Caravaggio. His unavoidable emphasis on refining first-person experience seems meant to correct the widely misunderstood principle at the heart of “The Invisible Dragon.”

For if beauty is indeed an attribute of response, Hickey means to respond. The lovely, liberating eloquence of his deeply felt, often moving encounters with the peculiar democracy of objects in American life is very much the point.

“The act of perceiving the world and understanding it is pleasurable activity,” he says. “But when art’s no fun, you begin to wonder: What am I doing? This is a lot like school!”

“Air Guitar” is naked pleasure, executing an unabashed literary seduction. My guess is that, consoled by the dazzle of its beauty and challenged by its gorgeous eloquence, readers will find themselves creating a confluence of simple hearts around it.