Dave Hickey famous quotes

03-30-2025

Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else's privilege.
-- Dave Hickey

#Real #Taste #Privilege
Beauty is and always will be blue skies and open highway.
-- Dave Hickey

#Blue #Sky #Blue Sky
Beautiful art sells. If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells anything else, it is a seductive advertisement.
-- Dave Hickey

#Beautiful #Art #Seductive
My mother was an economics professor. I'm proficient in math, and statistics, game theory, symbolic logic and all of that.
-- Dave Hickey

#Mother #Math #Games
If I go to London, everyone wants to talk about Damien Hirst. I'm just not interested in him. Never have been.
-- Dave Hickey

#Want #London #Not Interested
Art editors and critics - people like me - have become a courtier class.
-- Dave Hickey

#Art #Editors #Class
Where do you learn how to act? Not at church. America is a lot more like pagan Rome than we think. We still sacrifice to objects to gain our social goals.
-- Dave Hickey

#Sacrifice #Thinking #Rome
I'm retiring because my time is up.
-- Dave Hickey

#Retiring
Jazz presumes that it would be nice if the four of us-simpatico dudes that we are-while playing this complicated song together, might somehow be free and autonomous as well. Tragically, this never quite works out. At best, we can only be free one or two at a time-while the other dudes hold onto the wire. Which is not to say that no one has tried to dispense with wires. Many have, and sometimes it works-but it doesn't feel like jazz when it does. The music simply drifts away into the stratosphere of formal dialectic, beyond our social concerns.
-- Dave Hickey

#Song #Nice #Two
I hate all that woozy political and psychotherapeutic crap applied to books and art.
-- Dave Hickey

#Art #Hate #Book
Martha Stewart contributes more to our civility than the Baptist Church.
-- Dave Hickey

#Church #Baptists #Civility
It used to be that if you stood in front of a painting you didn't understand, you'd have some obligation to guess. Now you don't,
-- Dave Hickey

#Painting #Used #Obligation
As my friend Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe has argued persuasively, there is an element of positivity in the visible world, and in color particularly, that totally eludes the historicity of language, with its protocols of absence and polarity. The color red, as an attribute of the world, is always there. It is something other than the absence of yellow and blue--and, thus, when that red becomes less red, it becomes more one or the other. It never exists in a linguistic condition of degradation or excess that must necessarily derive from our expectations.
-- Dave Hickey

#Positivity #Blue #Color
Out of sheer perversity, I followed beauty where it lead, into the silence.
-- Dave Hickey

#Silence
Choosing beauty over content (or choosing beauty as content) is always an act of sedition. If we accept the cant of official culture, we must believe that the beauty we steal from any man-made thing is stolen from its more virtuous and metaphysical backstory, wherein "real" beauty is said to reside.
-- Dave Hickey

#Real #Believe #Men

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