Dave Hickey

Essays explore the influence of art in twentieth-century American culture, including jazz, basketball, professional wrestling, magic, gambling, entrepreneurship, series television and automotive design

Essays on Art & Democracy

Air Guitar

A beautiful voice that reliably changes the quality of my thoughts. 

Adam Scharf

Gavin

Colleagues of mine will tell you that people despise critics because they fear our power. But I know better. People despise critics because people despise weakness, and criticism is the weakest thing you can do in writing. It is the written equivalent of air guitar—flurries of silent, sympathetic gestures with nothing at their heart but the memory of the music. It produces no knowledge, states no facts, and never stands alone. It neither saves the things we love (as we would wish them saved) nor ruins the things we hate. Edinburgh Review could not destroy John Keats, nor Diderot Boucher, nor Ruskin Whistler; and I like that about it. It’s a loser’s game, and everybody knows it.



Some of the most pleasurable prose I've ever read. It's so good, I worry I'm being convinced of things I shouldn't be. Like, say, Chesterton he is besotted with paradoxes and the contrary. Like Chesterton he is more than good enough to outweigh his questionable opinions.


  
it has always seemed to me that Rockwell and [Johnny] Mercer must certainly be important artists, not so much because people love them (although that is a part of it) but because I had learned so much from them—and because they both denied it so strenuously. Still, for a long time, I really didn’t know what kind of art they made, or what it did. I only knew that it wasn’t high art, which is defined by its context and its exclusivity—and is always, in some sense, about that context and that exclusivity.

I decided that, if high art is always about context and exclusivity, the art of Rockwell and Mercer, which denies both with a vengeance, must be about that denial. To put it simply: Norman Rockwell’s painting, like Johnny Mercer’s music, has no special venue. It lives in the quotidian world with us amidst a million other things, so it must define itself as we experience it, embody itself and be remembered to survive. So it must rhyme, must live in pattern, which is the mother of remembering. Moreover, since this kind of art lacks any institutional guarantee of our attention, it must be selected by us—and since it aspires to be selected by all of us, it must accept and forgive us too—and speak the language of acceptance and forgiveness. And since it can only flourish in an atmosphere of generosity and agreement, it must somehow, in some way, promote that atmosphere.

Thus, there is in Rockwell (as there is in Dickens) this luminous devotion to the possibility of domestic kindness and social accord—along with an effortless proclivity to translate any minor discord into comedy and forgiving tristesse—and this domain of kindness and comedy and tristesse is not the truth, but it is a part of it, and a part that we routinely deny these days, lest we compromise our social agendas...

This is what he celebrates and insists upon: that “normal” life, in this country, is not normal at all—that we all exist in a general state of social and physical equanimity that is unparalleled in the history of humans. (Why else would we alert the media every time we feel a little bit blue?)



This book turned my head around. Here a lifelong art critic and practitioner disparages high art and its comparatively shallow theorists; glorifies Vegas, Liberace, and Norman Rockwell, and cries out for a little honest vulgarity, a little fun. He says confusing things about social identity which I still haven't quite unpicked. Here he tells us that his profession is pathetic, beneath us. Writing was not atop the world, and so the profession wasn't, and so...


  
I see the object. I translate that seeing into vision. I encode that vision into language, and append whatever speculations and special pleadings I deem appropriate to the occasion. At this point, whatever I have written departs. It enters the historical past, perpetually absent from the present, and only represented there in type—while the visible artifact remains in the present moment—positively there, visually available for the length of its existence regardless of its antiquity—perpetually re-created by the novelty of its experiential context. As a consequence, what I write and what I have written about diverge from the moment of their confluence and never meet again.

The writing gets older with each passing moment while the artifact gets newer. There are works of art on the wall of my apartment, for instance, that I have written about in the past. They remain as fresh and devious today as the first day I set eyes upon them, invariably evoking the sense memory of that first bright encounter—while the words I wrote on that occasion, informed by that brightness, have yellowed into antiquity and seem to me now as weathered and grotesque as Dorian’s portrait. Thus, in the same sense that there is only historical writing, there is no historical art beyond those imaginary works that critics describe in writing.



From high in the airy galleries of California I am shown earthiness, gratitude, poptimism, concreteness, and puncturing pretense. All in a format lacking in them or unsuited to them. He told me to get out of my head, and somehow I listened.


  
Thanks to Waylon {Jennings], as well, and to Willie Nelson, Bobby Bare, and Hank Williams, Jr. for their insights into the life and art of Hank Williams; and thank you to Isaiah Berlin, Jane Jacobs, Jacqueline Lichtenstein, Nathalie Sarraute, and Leo Steinberg



How is this book not known for what it is? How can an academic write like this?

Air Guitar Essays on Art & Democracy

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