ARISTOTLE IN THE LAND OF THE SLOT MACHINE
Critic Dave Hickey's new American visions
Imagine a cross between the Victorian aesthete Walter Pater and gonzo
journalist Hunter S. Thompson, and you have something close to Dave Hickey: a
critic whose single-minded pursuit of beauty takes him to some of the more
unlikely corners of American culture, including those often dismissed as popular,
commercial, or otherwise "unserious." The author of Air Guitar: Essays on Art
and Democracy, Hickey has been riling the art world and assorted tenured
culturati with his heretical pronouncements on such things as the excellence of
Norman Rockwell's paintings, the folly of government arts funding, and the
charms of Las Vegas.
Negotiating the busy Vegas strip in his white Cadillac Eldorado, the 59-year-old
writer dressed in casino casual (a black "New York, New York" jacket and black
"Bellagio" baseball cap) manages to smoke, sip coffee, and assess the passing
architectural scene without ever losing the thread of his attack on the American
intellectual establishment and particularly the "wan pessimism" that has become
its official attitude.
"It all goes back to Henry Adams," Hickey explains. "He was the first to put the
glaze of Puritan respectability on Marxist cultural pessimism." As Hickey sees it,
that attitude--contemptuous of commerce and sensual pleasures--eventually
became the ruling outlook of the academy. Fortified by European cultural
criticism, it now amounts, in Hickey's view, to a dour, formulaic dismissal of
American popular energies and imagination in the name of some supposedly
higher, more virtuous good. "This is what all university types agree on," Hickey
says, "whether Marxist or conservative: The anxiety of capitalist culture is bad, so
we need an elite to run it."
For the past nine years, Hickey has been teaching art criticism and theory at the
University of Nevada-Las Vegas, but academia is clearly not his natural habitat.
After flirting with graduate school at the University of Texas, he ran an art gallery
in Austin, wrote songs in Nashville, worked as a magazine editor in New York,
and produced articles for publications like Rolling Stone and Art in America.
Even now, Hickey sees himself as a freelance writer, more attuned to the
entrepreneurial ways of the "traders and raiders" of his adopted city than to the
group-think style of the professoriate. "Las Vegas has no sissies, no dummies,
and full accountability," Hickey boasts. "It's a place where people work very hard,
unlike universities."
No mere curmudgeon, Hickey has a coherent vision of how art can function in
society. In America since the late 1940s, he says, it's mostly been derailed,
thanks to a network of foundations, museums, government agencies, and
academic theorists. In addition to ignoring what is vital in the wider culture, this
establishment has promoted much that is bad. As he explains in one of his
essays, "when the 'support systems' that support artists isolate them from the
broader culture that they supposedly serve, the practice of art begins to die, as it
is dying today."
And how do we know when art is alive and well? In a tribute to Robert Mitchum,
Hickey interrupts his analysis of the actor's technique with what seems a merely
personal observation: "Not even Elvis was cooler than Mitchum, and . . . I
decided that if I only dated women who thought Robert Mitchum was cool, I
would be OK . . . ." But then he adds the serious point: "This is what culture does:
It correlates us in relation to one another." Art that fails to elicit primal reactions,
that leaves us at sea among our kind, is not doing its job, no matter how many
times we are told that it is good--or good for us.
Aristotelian standards. Hickey's approach might resemble that of many
fashionable cultural-studies scholars, who tout comic books and TV sitcoms over
classic works of "dead white males," but he doesn't interpret popular works in
order to advance a subtle critique of American social ills. Nor does he segregate
popular art from the great traditions. Whether exploring the tunes of Chet Baker
or the comic routines of Richard Pryor, he holds his subject to strict, almost
Aristotelian standards. Talking about Karen and Richard Carpenter's rendition of
"Goodbye to Love," for example, he could be talking about any great work of art:
"It gives us what we want at the expense of what we expect, thus elevating the
song out of the melodrama of pop music--which confounds our desires and
expectations--into the realm of pure comedy, in which our desires are improbably
fulfilled."
Aristotle come to Vegas? The implausibility is part of what makes Hickey such an
American original. And while he likens the craft of criticism to playing the air
guitar--"flurries of silent, sympathetic gestures with nothing at their heart but the
memory of the music"--he is surely wrong when he claims that it cannot save "the
things we love." When it works, criticism does just that.
By Jay Tolson
Copyright 1990 the U.S. News & World Report