I just wasted a couple of hours reviewing The Invisible Dragon for Amazon- so what the hey, might as well post it on my digital diary:
I fully understand David Hickey’s impulse in writing these
essays. The strongest essay being the one
in which he reacts to the Academy’s defense (or not) of Robert Maplethorpe
during the culture wars of the 80’s. I
thought it was really incisive and a truly creative way of seeing things, and
it gave me a lot to think about. As to
his more general thoughts on Beauty, the essays themselves are cogent and in
the abstract, if not in the particulars, convincing.
Hickey is basically ranting against the “Academy” (or Art
Establishment), and not because he sees it as colluding with the market, like
some reviewer inferred, in fact, quite au contraire. In these essays Hickey defends the
marketplace for being the ultimate arbiter, through democratic wrangling, of
value, beauty, and meaning.
Again, I do get the impulse behind this kind of thinking. It must be born of years of looking at too
much uninspiring art sanctioned by the Academy due to its prescriptive value
instead of that thing that good art can do, which is move us in ways that
perhaps will always remain essentially undefinable. And boy is there ever a lot of that crap out
there passing for Art (and the word Art still implies “good” even after all
these years since Greenberg).
Hickey decries the Academy (in which he includes even what I
find to be our no-real-lover-of-the-arts Government) for funding such art on
the basis of it being “good for us” instead of “making us happy”. And he does this by riffing on the
Declaration of Independence and by quoting Thomas Paine. And again, I feel his pain (no pun intended); but I think his
approach might be simplistic. In essence, Hickey calls for Beauty to be
determined in the Forum, the laissez-faire marketplace. Given that in this day and age a lot of the
art sanctioned by the Academy has precisely to do with investigating the deleterious
effects of the market on the production of “true” art, I can see where he might
have ruffled some feathers; and I smile at the thought of that.
I love his attitude and his writing; and I viscerally feel
what he is longing for, but his solution does not ring true. And I say this as a person who believes that
markets work for the good of the people, most of the time; but even
laissez-faire capitalism needs some regulation when decisions made according to
its principles do more harm than good.
The market alone has made as many mistakes about what is good art as the
Academy has. Norman Rockwell is still
crap[1],
as is Thomas Kincaid. Unfettered
democracy might produce what the people want, and Hickey has the right to slap
the word “Beautiful” on the result; but I don’t think it’s that easy. That being said, the book is a good read and
gets one really involved in determining and arguing one’s own value system.
[1] Even
though, at some point, someone, probably “the marketplace”, convinced The
Academy, or more precisely the Guggenheim to embrace it/him for a season.
