Dave Hickey
"My ten millionth grandfather was Jonathan Edwards," critic Dave Hickey told us last week as part of the Clarice Smith Distinguished Lecture Series at American Art. He added, "But I'm not going to give you any of that." What he did give us, instead, was a thought-provoking hour on the nature of contemporary art in America and how ideals of art and the artist in society were shaped centuries ago. From the Roman Republic to the Florentine Renaissance to the downtown New York art world that emerged after World War II, Hickey riffed on the themes of paganism, materialism, commerce, success, and mediocrity.
Hickey is upset and concerned that in American democracy the average becomes the paradigm, and he used the example of an everyman fiddling with his iPhone in the mall. Institutions in America such as museums, foundations, and the government all level things off because what they know is how to make a democracy. "Americans can make great art, literature, and music, but American institutions cannot help at all in this," said Hickey. The majority has never created exceptional art. It has always been the minority "working in the backwash of his own work" that creates great art. Hickey even called in James Madison for backup and quoted the founding father as saying, "Genius is an accident, mediocrity is a fact."
The art world in America was formed by people who did not create a celebration of America but a refuge from it. What people created in those downtown lofts was a victory over rectitude. If you look at Jackson Pollock, Donald Judd, and Jasper Johns, you somehow become human in a way. Or, as Hickey put it, "American art is the cure for the malaise of statistical disembodied life we live here in America. . . . Works of art in their idiosyncrasy and outrageousness have the ability to rescue us from that world if we want to be rescued."
"Why don't we let the art world be what it is, which is a cure for America," Hickey said near the end of his talk, before taking questions from members of the audience.
Join us on November 18th for our third Clarice Smith Lecture when Linda Nochlin will present "Consider the Difference: American Women Artists from Cassatt to Contemporary."
