My Lunch With Dave Hickey

“A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.”--Ernest Hemingway

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My phone rings. “Dave Hickey,” the caller announces, his tone wary. This is to be expected of an interview subject who has, himself, done dozens of journalistic interrogations and thus knows the tricks of the trade. With little introductory chitchat, he cuts to the chase. “What’s the spin?” he inquires. Then he quickly supplies one: “This is probably just a lion-in-winter story,” he says. “Ever since I got the MacArthur my life has just kinda gone to--”

Here he uses an expletive that he knows is unprintable. The remark is a stopper, not just because of that but because “the MacArthur” is the fabled “genius award” offered by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to high achievers--with no strings attached and no expectations except that the person . . . be brilliant. The MacArthur--Hickey’s 2001 award amounted to $500,000--is not generally noted for turning one’s life to dung.

And Dave Hickey’s life, at least on paper, is of the “you-should-be-so-lucky” variety. At 63, he is indisputably one of the country’s reigning intellectual heavyweights: His books of criticism sell well, Artspace Books of San Francisco recently released his new book of short stories, his work has been printed in journals from Vanity Fair to Art in America to the Village Voice, and an art show he curated recently in Santa Fe, N.M., got glowing reviews. In a field rife with petty snobbery and backbiting, he is a critic’s critic. The New Yorker’s art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, wrote that Hickey’s books, including “The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty” (1993) and “Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy” (1997), “may be the most influential works of art theory and appreciation published in the last decade. They are surely the most original.” Rock critic Robert Christgau has said, “You can make the case that he’s the best critic in America.”

As the MacArthur citation proclaims, “Hickey reveals entirely original perspectives on contemporary art in essays that engage academic and general audiences equally.” Kudos pile on kudos, lauding his “piercing insights” and “wisdom and unusual viewpoints.” But then the MacArthur folks sneak in a phrase that offers the first hint of The Trouble With Dave: “Free-spirited and occasionally irreverent.”

Occasionally?

Let’s fess up here: The reason for the call to Hickey isn’t only because he’s an aesthetic thinker of rare depth and complexity, but also because his writings and public utterances are the work of a true (and increasingly rare) American archetype--the literary maverick. He’s a latter-day Ambrose Bierce or H.L. Mencken, happily locating the culture’s hot air balloons of pomp and pretension, political correctness and (worst of all) professionalism, then popping those gasbags with invectives that are all the more ferocious for being so funny. Think Mark Twain crossed with Lenny Bruce.

But there’s a downside to being the “He didn’t actually say that, did he?” guy. As the Japanese proverb goes, “The nail that sticks up must be pounded down.”

As we are about to discover at a lunch with Mr. Hickey.

*

“Art in Vegas is the name of your limousine driver.”--Robert Hughes

*

So now we’re in the unlikely hometown of one of America’s leading culture critics, scuttling across a broiling Las Vegas parking lot toward Peppermill Restaurant, one of those Strip establishments that looks like a throwback to the Las Vegas of Bugsy Siegel and the Rat Pack. Glancing at it, one thinks of the word “underbelly.”

“The art crowd hangs out here,” Hickey remarks as we find refuge in the restaurant’s bubble of refrigerated air. He greets the maitre d’ by name and we are instantly seated, jumping the line of wilted tourists cluttering the lobby. It confirms Hickey’s offhand remark earlier that he’s “got some juice,” the catchall Vegas phrase that means anything from “I got comped to Danny Gans” to “I beat the indictment.”

He may be the only University of Nevada, Las Vegas professor (he’s been on the faculty since 1992) who can make that claim. Peppermill’s lounge is very “Ocean’s Eleven,” with every surface covered in red velvet and the bar inlaid with flickering video poker machines--Hickey’s game of choice. He says he plays most afternoons after he completes his 3 a.m.-to-noon writing stint.

Why video poker?

“Oblivion,” Hickey says with a crooked grin. Then he adds that gambling is “cheaper and not as bad for you as cocaine. The reason it’s not as bad for you is you never did a line of cocaine and had some guy come through the door and say, ‘You’ve just won two more lines.’ ” Hickey, whose long involvement with various mood-altering drugs has been extensively self-described, says he now confines himself to caffeine.

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“I believe that the public likes criticism only in so far as it is a good show, which means only in so far as it is bellicose.”--H.L. Mencken

*

Three things might occur to you after listening to Hickey: The man’s mind is quick, dangerous (mostly to himself) and pretty much out of step with the political temper of art’s highest precincts. This is in keeping with his writing--from catalog essays to criticism to “Air Guitar”--which have as their single, dyspeptic theme the wreck and ruin of contemporary American life. It’s not just art that’s screwed up--it’s, well, almost everything.

The current state of art? Hickey told a Santa Fe newspaper, “We’ve been through 20 years of art and I can’t remember anything.” As for museums, they’re “where we keep things that don’t mean anything anymore, but we still like how they look.” Nor does he cotton much to folks who throng museums: “They derive sanctioned pleasure from an accredited source, and this makes them feel secure.” The same goes for “art professionals, curators, museum directors and other bureaucratic support workers . . . parading among us like little tin saints.” Hickey has characterized his academic colleagues variously as “spiteful monks sworn to silence . . . silly, proprietary eunuchs in some sultan’s harem . . . cultural police” who have become “the General Motors of the art world.”

Which prompts an obvious question: “In your book,” I ask as Peggy Lee croons over Peppermill’s speakers, “you said you went to work at UNLV to get the health insurance. Surely it couldn’t have been that simple.”

“No,” he responds. “I like to teach. And the great tragedy of my liking to teach is that you have to do it in a university.” He ponders this a moment and says, “I think I’m a good teacher because I’m not parental . . . I don’t do daddy, I do Uncle Buck. I do, ‘Hey, smoke this,’ you know. I treat ‘em like adults.”

I remind him that teaching often isn’t highly valued at big-time research universities.

“Unfortunately not,” says Hickey. “They regard teaching today as a form of self-realization therapy.”

“This must make for lively conversation between you and others at the university. Are there any other people at UNLV who fall into your camp?”

“My wife and I . . . we’re pretty much the camp. Again, I’m a very permissive person. I don’t think people should agree with me. I’m friends with people who don’t agree with me. I’m not concerned with how it should be. I’m concerned with how it is.”

But Hickey also observes that one of the nicest things about getting the MacArthur was “to see the looks on my colleagues’ faces when they realized that all their work to get me out of the university was going to go for naught because of some [extremely colorful plural expletive] in Chicago . . . .”

Then he drops a nugget of plastique: “I was planning to quit the university. My department was happy to have me quit. The dean of fine arts was happy to have me quit. And when I got the MacArthur, the president of the university wanted me to stay. So the conditions under which I would stay were to be if I went over to the writing department.” (Jeffrey Koep, dean of UNLV’s College of Fine Arts, where Hickey held his art professorship, says later, “Well, he didn’t confide that to me . . . I hadn’t heard that.” As for Hickey’s many jabs at academia, Koep says, “You could be cynical about it and say, ‘Dave, why are you collecting a salary from that which you criticize and is fool enough to pay you?’ On the other hand, isn’t that supposedly what academia is about? The ultimate expression of free speech and thought?”)

So post-MacArthur, Hickey has transferred his flag to the university’s new International Institute of Modern Letters. Good move?

“Well, they don’t hate me over there,” he says.

When I ask whether university writing programs have become a little too precious, Hickey says, “I don’t usually get along with writers, I usually get along best with artists.” Why? “Because they do physical [stuff], you know, and American literature is not of much interest to me right now. I never want to read another novel that narrates some 5-year-old guy eating a bowl of Wheaties. I’m not interested in that . . . I mean, that’s most of what you read in books.”

*

“Alone among the animals, [man] is dowered with the capacity to invent imaginary worlds, and he is always making himself unhappy by trying to move into them.”--H.L. Mencken

*

That Hickey has had an impact on the art world is beyond dispute: He happily characterizes himself as “bankable,” to use the Hollywood phrase. In 1999 he showed that he could move the art market when his impassioned defense of Norman Rockwell was largely credited for getting a show of the Saturday Evening Post artist’s work moved into higher-profile venues, where (The horror! The horror!) it promptly set attendance records.

It was far from the first time that he got folks upset. In “Invisible Dragon,” he dared to discuss artworks as objects of “beauty”--and what a marvelous ruckus that word prompted. To the reigning art establishment, the notion of “beauty” is politically incorrect, outmoded, even dangerous. “There’s a long history of that [word] being invoked to exclude and to empower the person making the call,” says Amelia Jones, a professor of art history at UC Riverside.

Undeterred, when Hickey curated last year’s SITE Santa Fe’s Fourth International Biennial, he impudently titled the show, “Beau Monde: Toward a Redeemed Cosmopolitanism.” That’s “beautiful world” for you non-Francophones.

To summarize Hickey’s aesthetics here would be a disservice to their range and complexity. Hickey makes few pretensions about appealing to Mr. and Mrs. Breakfast Nook. “Doing what I do,” he says, chugging a Peppermill cappuccino, “there’s not a lot to be gained by being a public person. You know what I mean? It’s important that certain artists and certain dealers and certain writers know who I am. Outside of that, it’s not really much to my advantage.”

As for most art aficionados, they’re merely “spectators.” It may be the dirtiest diss in the Hickey lexicon, for he passionately believes that art objects aren’t nearly as important as the communities that art creates. “Because art doesn’t matter,” Hickey writes. “What matters is how things look and the way we look at them in a democracy.” Works of art, he says, “are candidates, aspiring to represent complex constituencies.”

In this sense, you might compare Hickey to a horse-racing writer who’s more concerned with racetrack touts, jockeys and stable hands than, say, Seattle Slew. They wouldn’t be there without the horse--but then the horse is only an excuse for a hell of a show. And Hickey loves the show.

Which brings us to Hickey’s characterization of art as “a betting sport.” Alone among critics, Hickey talks about art’s one taboo subject: selling the stuff. In his book “Air Guitar,” his essay “Dealing” is a tour de force of art’s dirty little mercantile secrets, based on Hickey’s experiences in the late 1960s running the legendary A Clean Well-Lighted Place gallery in Austin, Texas (he went on to direct New York’s Reese Palley Gallery as well).

“Money is the emblem of the risks you’re willing to take to have some say in the way things look,” he writes, adding--perhaps the deepest insult to art cognoscenti--”Art ain’t rocket science.”

It all fits into Hickey’s core belief: “There’s no difference between the highest art and the lowest art except for the audience it appeals to.” Then, he adds, “Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else’s privilege.”

He didn’t say that--did he?

*

“There is only one justification for having sinned, and that is to be glad of it.”--H.L. Mencken

*

“I’m in a sort of regrouping mode,” Hickey says when asked about his life after the award. “And I’ve become theatrically out of step, thanks to the MacArthur.”

Theatrically out of step?

“What I mean is, I was always kind of a, you know, impudent bad boy, and it was kind of fun to have me come in and be booed. But to have me come in as a MacArthur person and do the same thing lends it more weight than I think people wish it to have.”

Hickey considers this a moment.

“But maybe not,” he says. “I mean, we’re all just one-hit wonders. You only write ‘Daydream Believer’ once or ‘Sugar Sugar’ . . . let me put it like this: Whatever change I might have evoked in the art world has already been evoked, and it hasn’t been very profound. I think that most of the influence that I’ve had has mostly been the occasion for a massive counter-reaction, a closing of ranks among those people in power--in other words, I probably made it worse. It has not opened any doors, hasn’t occasioned any offers. In fact, it’s been the reverse. It’s made it very difficult to get paid. I haven’t been paid for anything I’ve done in Europe for two years.”

Really?

“No, they just stopped paying me. The presumption always in the art world is that you have money . . . because if you get paid you can’t think of yourself as a saint. And too many people in the art world think of themselves as saints. ‘Oh, we’re only trying to help.’ ”

Then Hickey observes: “If I wanted to write any of the essays in ‘Air Guitar’ or ‘Invisible Dragon’ today, I couldn’t because I wouldn’t have a place to publish them. Where would I do it? Couldn’t do it for Harper’s--they’re not liberal enough. Couldn’t do it for, you know, anyplace else--I’m not conservative enough.”

That’s not to say Hickey doesn’t get the word out. “I have lots of catalog things to write and I can lecture every once in a while,” he says, adding that for a “short writer” whose work appears in short-lived periodicals, lecturing is a way of wringing a few extra bucks out of the material.

“I try to be charming,” Hickey says of life on the stump, “and I’m extremely glib. And that seems to make people hesitate to attack me. That just means that people are sullen, you know what I mean? At universities you go in and you’re talking, usually in a medium-sized auditorium. Kids are up front, the faculty’s along the back row. As you’re talking, you just watch the faculty filing out. So by the time you’re done, nobody’s left but the one guy who’s got to take you back to the motel.”

Hickey finds this greatly amusing. And it is a funny story--the butt of most Hickey jokes, both printed and verbal, is usually himself. But as with most great humor, there’s an undercurrent of tragedy as well. It’s damn tough being a maverick, with all those hammers waiting to pound you down.

To which Hickey replies: “[For] a person like myself, who is privileged with a deep repository of I-Don’t-Care, that means that I can say and do things that need to be said and done, totally heedless of the consequences, because I don’t care. There’s nothing I want to win. So that’s a privilege, and you try to take advantage of it.”

Then the self-proclaimed lion in winter puts it all into perspective: “I’ve had enough adventure in my life. Once one has been on tour with Aerosmith,” here Hickey unleashes his machine-gun laugh, “and you [have sex with] someone you saw in the movies and you sit in a Mexican jail, what the hell else is there?”

*

Hickey on Hickey

Although he is best known for his books of criticism, Dave Hickey also is a short-story writer of uncommon talent. His latest book, “Stardumb,” came about because “a friend of mine, [the artist] John DeFazio, wanted to do this astrology book . . . then I decided I would write these little narratives. I did them one a day.”

The stories are exquisite. In their precision, deadpan humor and elevation of the commonplace into art, they bring to mind writers such as Raymond Carver, John O’Hara and, even, Hemingway. The stories revolve around the art world--dealers, artists on the make, writers, patrons. No one’s hands are entirely clean.

“Some are me,” Hickey says. “Some are other people.” Then the critic reemerges: “They’re not polished . . . they don’t kind of bang! the way they should--but they get better as you go through the book, as I kind of got the hang of it.”

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Hickey on Everything Else

“There’s no difference between the highest art and the lowest art, except for the audience it appeals to. I have never seen more art and craft and thought and gift and talent and learning go into anything as watching Allen Toussaint produce a Meters record in New Orleans. That was real art.”

“[In] the 20th century, that’s all there is: jazz and rock ‘n’ roll. The rest is just term papers and advertising.”

“I don’t care anything about church. I hold this sort of ‘electric meat’ theory of the human condition and I am as spiritual as snot.”

“I have gradually come to distrust the very idea of high art in a democracy.”

“People despise critics because people despise weakness, and criticism is the weakest thing you can do in writing.”