20 The New York Reviewperformers Siegfried and Roy. The
German couple, known for perfect
hairdos, billowing open collars, and the
astonishing feats of their white tigers,
had transformed Romantic schlock and
camp styling into the most visited main-
stream attraction in Vegas. Hickey’s
piece is framed as a fairy tale without a
drop of condescension while also keep-
ing the humor of the duo’s flamboyant
artifice intact. A description of their
new show at the Mirage cartwheels
into a consideration of Victorian pan-
tomime’s structures and their subver-
sion of social and sexual orders. By the
end, Hickey’s meditation on sincerity
and the self makes one feel ashamed to
have ever thought so little about these
two “outsider artists” whose multime-
dia spectacle was “the brightest facet of
the American Saturnalia.”
By the time he was fifty, Hickey’s
life had taken a decisive turn all but
unfathomable a decade earlier. He was
hired as an associate professor of art
criticism and theory at the University
of Nevada at Las Vegas; he met the art
historian who would become his wife,
Libby Lumpkin, another runaway from
West Texas; and he was publishing long
essays that fused serious literature and
critical thought with the emotional
appeal of popular music. He began to
write regularly for Art issues., follow-
ing “Lost Boys” with a heartrending
meditation on Chet Baker:Today, having written some songs
myself, I see that Baker knew what
all songwriters know, what singers
like Judy Garland and Patsy Cline
and Karen Carpenter knew most
profoundly, that all songs are sad
songs, borne as they are on the in-
substantial substance of our fleet-
ing breath.Next, Kornblau suggested a subject:
Liberace. Growing up as a gay kid, he
had always felt ashamed by Liberace’s
fabulously smarmy persona. But as he
came into his sexual identity, he became
increasingly enamored. Hickey wrote
“A Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz,” cen-
tered on the Liberace Museum, which
was located in a strip mall in Vegas and
displayed the entertainer’s bejeweled
possessions. It is a microcosm of all
his writing on popular culture, invert-
ing and then demolishing the oppo-
sition set up by the art critic Clement
Greenberg in his essay “Avant- Garde
and Kitsch” (1939). Greenberg posi-
tions the cutting edge of “avant-garde”
art against its dialectical opposite, the
ersatz culture of “kitsch” intended for
mass appeal to a nominally educated
working class without the leisure time
for true cultivation. For Greenberg in
the 1930s, kitsch was inseparable from
the rise not only of industrialization
but of totalitarianism, bringing new
and heady weight to distinctions of
“taste.”
But for Hickey, “bad taste is real
taste, of course, and good taste is the
residue of someone else’s privilege,” an
axiom that the professionally closeted
yet outlandish Liberace embodied in
its fullest form as he played renditions
of the Moonlight Sonata on TV spe-
cials that made grandmothers across
the country cry. Hickey argues that
Liberace was a uniquely American
aesthetic and sexual revolutionary who
epitomized a tradition of theatrical
transgression that pulsed with its own
content of race, sex, and class. Liber-ace’s sexual identity was something
that “mainstream” people understood
and at least tacitly accepted, even if,
much like the man himself, they were
never able to speak the words. After
detailing the painful contradictions of
Liberace’s life, Hickey argues that pop-
ular culture is inseparably and legiti-
mately connected to what Greenberg
deemed “higher” expressions, and that
kitsch may have a capacity for truly
subversive content in ways the avant-
garde never dreamed of:The battle for sexual tolerance
has moved on to other, more po-
litical, battlefields, and, in view
of this transformation, I think we
can regard the Liberace Museum
as having some general historical
significance beyond the enshrining
of a particularly exotic entertainer.
Its artifacts, genuine rhinestones,
and imitation pearls alike mark
an American moment— the be-
ginning of the end of the “open se-
cret.” So the cars and the costumes
and the silly pianos might be seen
as more than just the memorabilia
of an exotic saloon singer: because
they are, in fact, the tools with
which Liberace took the “rhetoric
of the closet” public, demonstrated
the power of its generous duplicity,
and changed the world.Hickey continued writing on Map-
plethorpe in an essay that deals spe-
cifically with the question of beauty in
his most pornographic images. It was
originally for Parkett, but he pulled it
because the magazine wouldn’t repro-
duce the fisting photograph, Helmut
and Brooks (1978). Kornblau had the
idea of publishing it in a little paper-
back as the summer installment of
Art issues. They added Hickey’s essay
on gender and space in sixteenth- and
seventeenth- century painting called
“Prom Night in Flatland,” which had
appeared in the small German jour-
nal Eau de Cologne, and a new essay
called “After the Great Tsunami.” In
it Hickey put a finer point on his argu-
ment 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 mana-
gerial class” of art- world gatekeepers—
the curators, critics, and academics
who have disenfranchised audiences
from the validity of their own experi-
ences, 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.The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays
on Beauty appeared with a sketch by
Ed Ruscha of the Los Angeles County
Museum engulfed in flame on its cover.
The polemic was just sixty- four pages
long, but it set the art world ablaze.
Hickey was invited to speaking engage-
ments and panel discussions in schools
and museums around the country— to
be yelled at, he felt. While art histori-
ans studiously ignored him, the book
rode a perfect wave of transition in the
art world. Postmodernism’s disman-
tling of the foundations of art history
left the discipline vulnerable to the
advent of “cultural studies,” plunging
Hickey and his book into the midst ofa war within the academy. While re-
ceiving accolades, he felt increasingly,
bitterly misunderstood. He described
the bewildering experience in a
third- person narrative for the revised
and expanded edition of the book
in 2009:In the Dragon’s wake, he gave
lectures in university auditoriums
during which the faculty rose en
masse from their seats in the back
row and marched out. Honorari-
ums were withheld. Dinners were
canceled. Litigation was threat-
ened. The endowed lecturer was
deposited unceremoniously at
a Ramada Inn beside an empty
highway and left to dine out of the
candy machine. The endowed lec-
turer found this hurtful, but less
and less so as time went on. He sat
on the bed in his motel room. He
contemplated the blond furniture.
He stared out into the black mid-
western night. Tiny lights twinkled
in the distance. If he were still in a
band, he could have been sitting at
a Denny’s drinking coffee with the
rhythm section.Hickey didn’t just bite the hand that
fed him, in front of live audiences and
in print, but expected to be loved for
doing it so well. And he was passion-
ately embraced by aspiring and working
artists and musicians while being vehe-
mently attacked by the professionals
whom he mocked as the “therapeutic
institution.” This will to self- sabotage
by a truth- teller who knew and loved
both Foucault and the Carpenters iron-
ically strengthened the glamour of his
anti- institutional position, increasingly
at the cost of his being engaged as a se-
rious writer and thinker.
Kornblau suggested a way of an-
swering the critics: narrating his own
“proliferation of beauties.” Hickey’s
new column in Art issues. was devoted
to the memories, ideas, art, books, and
music that mattered most to him. Titled
Simple Hearts, after the Flaubert sto-
ry— an aesthetic talisman for him since
his teenage years— he indulged in full
creative freedom, including “Shining
Hours / Forgiving Rhyme,” a touching
parable about going to a jazz rehearsal
with his dad; “A Glass- Bottomed Ca-
dillac,” a first- person short story about
the painful inner life of Hank Wil-
liams; “Godiva Speaks,” a soliloquy by
one of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wres-
tling; and “The Little Church of Perry
Mason,” a homily on the dignity of a
freelance magazine writer. These were
gathered along with the earlier pieces
on Liberace, Chet Baker, and Siegfried
and Roy— twenty- three in all— and
published as Air Guitar.
Hickey’s friend the art critic Christo-
pher Knight wrote in the Los Angeles
Times last year that Air Guitar became
“easily the most widely read book of
art criticism to appear in our time.”
This is striking, considering how little
“art” appears in it. Instead, Air Gui-
tar 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.
These loving little pieces on pop culture
complement the dozens of major essays
Hickey wrote throughout the decade,
on artists ranging from Andy Warhol
and Bridget Riley to Vija Celmins and
Lari Pittman. Published in museumand gallery catalogs, the bulk of this
work (including the essays on Ruscha
and Gober) has yet to be collected.Hickey delighted in “difficulty”—
philosophical rigor attended by visual
abundance— and employed anecdote
as a pendant to analysis. The narrator
“Dave” recurs throughout Air Guitar,
like the protagonist of Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy, which provides its epigraph. In
the introduction, Hickey called the
effect an “odd sort of memoir: a mem-
oir without tears, without despair or
exaltation— a memoir purged of those
time- stopping exclamation points that
punctuate all our lives.”
It is not just the power, mastery,
and invention of Hickey’s writing that
makes it so singular, but its view of the
world. In Hickeyland, painters, singers,
wrestlers, and magicians develop from
a primordial woundedness— from a
profound alienation from the world,
which their art doesn’t necessarily heal
but seeks to address. It echoes Edmund
Wilson’s magisterial collection of lit-
erary essays The Wound and the Bow
(1941), which figures Philoctetes, the
ancient archer with “a snakebite that
lasts forever and a weapon that cannot
fail,” as diagramming the relation be-
tween artists, artworks, and their audi-
ence. The mythic hero’s putrid wound
drives people from him, but their need
for his gift, in order to win a war and
save their civilization, forces an uneasy
reconciliation. This is achievedonly by the intervention of one
who is guileless enough and
human enough to treat him, not as
a monster, nor yet as a mere mag-
ical property which is wanted for
accomplishing some end, but sim-
ply as another man, whose suffer-
ings elicit his sympathy and whose
courage and pride he admires.Similarly, and almost uniquely in con-
temporary criticism, Hickey’s writing
returns to artists both their painful hu-
manity and their extraordinary talents,
inextricably pushing them apart from,
and toward, their fellows. It honors the
simultaneity of Mapplethorpe’s “ab-
errant” sexuality and his photographs’
angelic light. Hickey’s advocacy for
“beauty” locates the arrow that flies
with unerring precision, hitting a strang-
er’s heart every time. Moving beyond
the personal psychology or biography
of an artist, the artwork extends an un-
likely 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.
No one can grant permission for
this kind of reconciliation grounded
in personal experience or legislate its
effect, thus explaining the vehemence
of Hickey’s anti- institutionalism. For
him, art is not defined by auction prices
or tenured jobs, but by the feeling that
it produces, bringing one into more
meaningful connection with other
people and the richness of being itself.
In an art world that has expanded in
transnational finance and professional
glut, Hickey’s writing remains more
relevant and radical than ever. Today
the immensity of his achievement casts
a shadow over the institutionalized
spaces of art history and criticism, flut-
tering above them on iridescent wings
made of words. QEarnest 16 21 .indd 20 5 / 25 / 22 4 : 06 PM