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My pessimistic prediction that there would be no New York Times review of Laura Parnes' show turned out to be wrong. Holland Cotter wrote about it last Friday. Just to give you the high spots, he contrasts Parnes' dark sensibility with the "fluffy stretch" we're supposedly having in the art world (which I still maintain is a figment in the brain of his Times colleague Roberta Smith), does a brief plot rundown on the piece, mentions the Columbine photo, and concludes by discussing Parnes' use of appropriated dialogue. He's ultimately too professionally courteous to name the source of some of the choicest bad lines. Cotter says it's a "crypto-conservative art critic," but who else but Dave Hickey could spout some of the nonsense recycled in Parnes' video?
In a memorable scene, an oily screenwriter played by Guy Richards Smit tries to pick up a young actress with this bit of pop philosophy:
"There are two types of people in the world. Those who like the Beatles and those who like the Stones. You see, Beatles fans actually care about the lyrics, but Stones fans just want to rock."To which the Generation Z-plus girl responds:
"I have no idea what you are talking about."I actually know a thing or two about Hickey, having endured his lousy eye and glib prose as an artist in Texas. Thinking I was rid of him, I moved to New York just as he was vaulting onto the national stage. He's essentially a quasi-beat fiction writer type that drifted into the art world, befriended artists, but never really "got" art. His attempt to be the go-to guy for "beauty" I wouldn't even call crypto-conservative, it's just conservative, even though his politics are strictly tenured radical.
Hickey's greatest achievement, I suppose, was twisting the theories of continental critics such as Deleuze & Guattari to make his own Critique of Institutional Critique, in the book The Invisible Dragon--that was damned clever! But if he's the new Clement Greenberg, who's his Jackson Pollock? After years of backslapping support for artist/country singer Terry Allen, he jumped on the Robert Mapplethorpe bandwagon, then more recently shifted his attention to West Coast abstractionists Tim Bavington and Yek Wong. He talks about Yek in terms of "sunshine art," which has something to do with LA, and surfaces that hold up to scrutiny in harsh daylight, I think. This is important?
Hickey does have his uses as a reactionary, though. One of my proudest moments as an artist was learning that he described a photocopy collage-painting of mine, in an unpublished interview, as "way too abject for me." He also mocked its "Teletubbies coloration." Now that rocks! I want those words--from the winner of a MacArthur Genius Grant, mind you--carved on my mantlepiece. Or perhaps tattooed on my left nut, to use a "rebellious" Hickey-sounding phrase.