in the art critic Dave Hickey’s enthusiasms for rock music, the neon lights of
Las Vegas, the stage shows of Liberace, and the magic shows of Siegfried and
Roy: enthusiasms that he sees as of a piece with genuine enthusiasm for high
art as well. As Hickey reflects on his experience of Siegfried and Roy,You never think, How was it done? You simply take pleasure in seeing the
impossible appear possible and the invisible made visible...We are...mortal
creatures, who...can appreciate levitating tigers and portraits by Raphael for
what they are–songs of mortality sung by the prisoners of time.^66
That is, since we are all dead in the long run, why not accept the fact that there
are some things in which some of us take pleasure“for its own sake”in the
meantime? Why not accept“the appearance of images, that by virtue of the
pleasure they give, are efficacious in their own right”?^67 Who has to care about
either art’s cultivation of the human or its reinscription of social antagonisms?
Why can’t we just have fun? Is there anything wrong with caring about the
guitar solos of Eddie Van Halen or the latest television situation comedy?
The trouble with this view–despite its considerable attractiveness in urging
us to be faithful to our own felt experience–is that it risks assimilating art to
decoration, entertainment, or whatever is successfully marketed, overlooking
the significanceof more difficult works thatinterrogate our condition. But if we
then return to more difficult works that invite and encourage thought about
deep longings in relation to social actuality, then we seem back in a foundering
Schillerian satiric or elegiac cultivation of the human or in politicized structur-
alist antihumanism, tendentious or emptily provocative.Art and social aspiration
Given our uncertainties about what is possible for us in relation to social
actuality, each of these stances remains both reasonable and in some meas-
ure limited. It seems important to keep alive the idea that we have deep
aspirations for meaningfulness that we seek to express in relation to ever-(^66) Dave Hickey,Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy(Los Angeles, CA: Distributed Art
Publishers, 1997), p. 189, cited in Alexander Nehamas,“The Return of the Beautiful:
Morality, Pleasure, and the Value of Uncertainty,”Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58 ,
4 (fall 2000), pp. 392–403 at p. 399A.
(^67) Hickey,The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty(Los Angeles, CA: Distributed Art
Publishers, 1993), p. 16, cited in Nehamas,“Return of the Beautiful,”p. 399B.
272 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art