Quotes from Dave Hickey

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.

People despise critics because people despise weakness, and criticism is the weakest thing you can do in writing. It is the written equivalent of air guitar—flurries of silent, sympathetic gestures with nothing at their heart but the memory of the music.

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

Beauty is and always will be blue skies and open highway.

I cannot tell you how many quiet mornings I have spent sitting around hotel rooms and furnished apartments in the United States and Mexico, smoking cigarettes, plunking the guitar, and watching Perry Mason --telling myself, "Well, at least I don't have a day job. And there is nothing wrong with that. I am not guilty of anything. Perry would see that in a minute.

Out of sheer perversity, I followed beauty where it lead, into the silence.

If there is no art, no culture, then what the fuck are we going to talk about? These are our stories and our stories are all we got!

The pieces in this book, then, are quite literally "speculative writing," neither stories nor essays but something more like fables: compressed narratives, grounded in real experience and as true as they need to be, with little "morals" at the end. They move directly from what I have seen and experienced to what I think about it, from the particular to the general, with none of the recursiveness of ordinary essays and short stories.

Defining the norm is its instrument of control over idiosyncrasy.

Martha Stewart contributes more to our civility than the Baptist church.

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

I have no evangelical feelings about art at all. I despise art education. Art doesn't lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It's a set of propositions about how things should look.

Art has political consequences, which is to say, it reorganizes society and creates constituencies of people around it.

My mother was an economics professor. I'm proficient in math, and statistics, game theory, symbolic logic and all of that.

I'm retiring because my time is up.

If I go to London, everyone wants to talk about Damien Hirst. I'm just not interested in him. Never have been.

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.

I don't think the government should touch art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage risk-averse personalities to be artists.

I hate all that woozy political and psychotherapeutic crap applied to books and art.

Art editors and critics - people like me - have become a courtier class.

Beauty is and always will be blue skies and open highway.