Dave Hickey Quotes

#1. Most famous artists are created by their work and the idea of them as a character, and if they're smart and ambitious, they reinforce that character because they want to win. They want their views to prevail.

Dave Hickey

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

Dave Hickey

#3. Gossip is the currency of the discourse, so you should shut up about yourself. Never confess, never explain, never apologize, and never complain.

Dave Hickey

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

Dave Hickey

#5. There are men everywhere who talk and talk, saying nothing. I am afraid I am becoming one of that kind.

Sherwood Anderson

#6. Skepticism is a religion very rich in evangelists but very short on saviors.

Robert Breault

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

Dave Hickey

#8. When you really respect somebody who does something different from you, your respect is for the quality of the job.

Dave Hickey

#9. I think that if you don't like something and it's not easy, you shouldn't be doing it.

Dave Hickey

#10. 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

#11. Art and writing come from somewhere down around the lizard brain. It's a much more peculiar activity than we like to think it is. The problems arise when we try to domesticate the practice, to pretend that it's a normal human activity and that "everybody's creative." They're not.

Dave Hickey

#12. The courts have their job to do, and we have ours. Far too often, they get to tell us what to do and when, but the judges know that the line exists, and most stay on their side of it. I'm not about to start giving them the ground that we still own.

Marc Rainer

#13. In Life, What Would Be Best For You, You Know It Best ...

Muhammad Imran Hasan

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

Dave Hickey

#15. I'm retiring because my time is up.

Dave Hickey

#16. 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!

Dave Hickey

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

Dave Hickey

#18. Beautiful art sells. If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells anything else, it is a seductive advertisement.

Dave Hickey

#19. 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.

Dave Hickey

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

Dave Hickey

#21. It is not enough to call yourself a 'free thinker' just because you can change your beliefs. A whole mess of people change their beliefs based on what is fashionable rather than what is factual, which, by always following the crowd, would be the complete opposite of the beauty of a free thinker.

Criss Jami

#22. 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

#23. 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

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

Dave Hickey

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

Dave Hickey

#26. Even if one succeeds in making a silk purse out of a sow's ear, there remains the problem of what to do with a one-eared sow.

Dave Hickey

#27. The idea of political content is irrelevant. Content is irrelevant. I always tell my students, "Never forget you're writing words! You know, word one, word two, word three, word four. The words have to be organized. Nothing else does."

Dave Hickey

#28. But as his years advanced Lewis had seen less and less purpose in distinguishing between fact and fiction.

Clive Barker

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

Dave Hickey

#30. Focus on what's important. Give more attention to your dreams than your fears, to your now than your then, to your expansive truth than other's diminishing lies.

Unknown 21

#31. In images, ... beauty was the agency that caused visual pleasure in the beholder; and any theory of images that was not grounded in the pleasure of the beholder begged the question of their efficacy and doomed itself to inconsequence.

Dave Hickey

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

Dave Hickey