The Beautiful and the Damned

Who’s afraid of Dave Hickey? By the time I moved to Los Angeles for art school in 2008, Hickey was a writer people loved to hate but seldom read. He’d established himself in Las Vegas as the cantankerous bard of the American vernacular, garnered a MacArthur Fellowship among other laurels, and symbolized a red-blooded admiration for beauty, sleaze, and commerce that was anathema to the political vogue in art (then as now). Few modern art critics have been so influential, and so roundl