DAVE HICKEY

Dave was interviewed October 19, 2000. In 2001 he received a MacArthur “Genius Award.”

Somehow . . . this most un-homelike of cities has come to function for me as a kind of moral bottom line--as a secular refuge and a source of comforts and reassurances that are unavailable elsewhere--as a home, in other words. (Dave Hickey in Tolson, 2001, p. 55).¹

Hickey and I are sitting outside the university=s architecture building on a very uncomfortable bench side-by-sideBnot ideal interviewing conditions. Hickey, though cordial, is difficult and busyBhis number is in the phone book, so he isn=t hard to get a hold of but he isn=t on campus much and I must accommodate his schedule.  He agrees to meet with me here after a roundtable discussion on architecture and community issues. The transcription of the  roundtable will later appear in the first issue of Architecture Las Vegas. Hickey smokes non-stop. He=s the kind of person you=d like to hang out with, have a beer with, who knows all the interesting, little-known spots around Vegas. Hickey is an art critic and has written such bocks are Air Guitar which includes a couple essays about Las Vegas. Hickey is an opponent of a Asense of community.@ He never wants to see a sense of community evolve here.

Other descriptions of Dave Hickey:

 . . . possibly the hippest art critic in America . . . his gravelly, Southern-inflected voice rolls out like distant thunder, promulgating one elegant idea after another and clocking them all in down-home tones. (Drohojowska-Philp, 2001, Calendar, p. 4).²

A native of Fort Worth, Texas, he holds degrees in English literature and linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin. . . .  In the late 1960s, he moved to Manhattan to run an art gallery, became executive editor of the magazine Art in America, then fled to Nashville in 1976 to write country-western songs and play rhythm guitar with the Marshall Chapman Band. . . . . During the 1980s, he returned to freelance writing and began teaching. Which led him in 1992 to his current position, professor of art criticism and theory at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. (ibid.)

Dave Hickey, with his grizzled trucker looks and Texan drawl, is a backwoods curmudgeon or a thoughtful hipster of the contemporary-art world. He wears wind-breakers patched with brand names, he chain-smokes and he counts among his aesthetic favourites low-riding cars, Jeff Koons and Norman Rockwell. He is also charming, funny and nimble, like a boxer. A foe of conceptual art, cultural theory and political correctness, Mr. Hickey says he wants to return beauty to contemporary art. (From, AHick or Hickey?,@ 2001, p. ?)³

Hickey is so fucking outspoken and controversial, and he=s just a pleasure to listen to.  The funny thing is, you have to keep in the back of your mind that this man is one of the preeminent art critics in the world today. Just remember that, because you=re going to easily forget that because Dave Hickey looks as much like one of the preeminent art critics in the world today as one of those homeless guys at the buffet.  Not that bad, but what I=m saying is, Hickey talks the talk, but he certainly doesn=t look the part. Not in any regard.  I mean, this is a man who used to hang with Andy Warhol and you will certainly be informed of that soon into a conversation. He was an art broker, he was an art dealer.  His adventures have brought him across the land, far and wide, and he decided that he was going to put his base, along with his wife, who made the same decision and who has an equal degree of prominence in the world, here.  If you can figure out why Dave Hickey decided to do that, then I think you=ve got the core of whatever project that you=re doing. I=m just periphery.( Dayvid Figler, personal communication, September 6, 2000)

He didn=t say anything about Andy Warhol, but here=s what Dave Hickey did say about the community of Las Vegas:

Community is about exclusion. I find Las Vegas to be a really nice place because of its lack of community. I like my apartment building. I like the guys from Mexico City next door, I like the Jamaican dancers, I like the Haitian boxers, I like the German guys downstairs, I like the gay heart surgeon next door. I like that mix. That=s interesting. That=s fun. I like the Indian plastic surgeon that lives upstairs and the Chinese day trader that lives next to him. Really, I=m being literal, I do. I like the little Jewish ladies. Ruth Brown the blues singer lives in the apartment right underneath me. That for me is heaven. That=s the world I=ve lived in my whole life.

It=s an urban culture in miniature. Its nice because you=ve got good things about the west, you=ve got the good weather and you=ve got a tolerant public social attitude. You don=t have entrenched Protestant power. You don=t have the white guys and the university club, the athletic club, the country club, the world that we all grew up in where everything is decided over lunch somewhere.  It=s a little more rough and tumble here. There are what Foucault calls fissures, there are safe places for people that don=t fit in and I find it to be very interesting.

It=s good for me because I=m a very busy person and it=s a very busy town. It=s close to LA, which I like a great deal. I really find it to be very exciting, it=s kind of insolubleBI mean it=s a permanently dynamic social situation. It=s irrevocably optimistic. What other town would elect a Mafia lawyer as mayor? That=s fucking great.

There are all these really thick subcultures here. You got your Cuban subculture, you got your old time Italian Catholic subculture, you got your Russian Orthodox subculture, you got your Byzantium Christian subculture, got your Thais, your Chinese, you got your gays. There=s an enormous gay community; percentage-wise probably one of your biggest communities in the city. You=ve got all these dancers and everything on The Strip, Las Vegas has more gay bars than Santa Monica Boulevard. I find it to be infinitely interesting.

My wife (Libby Lumpkin), worked at the Bellagio for Steve Wynn for two years, she was the curator of that art collection.  Her experience tended to confirm what I suspect about Las Vegas which is, what we find here in the general community, especially with the better businesses along the Strip, is the very best of what I would call community college America: good, steady, hardworking, bright, solid, people. It=s a city full of working people and union people and those white-flight pricks that live in Summerlin.

I live in an old =70s high-rise at Desert Inn and Swenson right by the community center. I have a 9^th -floor apartment that overlooks the whole StripBit=s real nice. The same apartment in LA would be ten-grand a month, so I can=t complain. I=m an urban person and like going down to Bagelmania on Twain and having breakfast with all the Jewish suspendered dudes down there. Most of mine and Libby=s friends are from the Strip culture.

I can=t image what kind of community you would have in Vegas if you had one. It might come out of a young adult Vegas, P.F.Changs, where everybody=s got a little dot.com, a smart aggressive commercial culture of young adults.

The demographics of the city have shifted radically to the right mostly because of white-flight, people from LA and from Phoenix. Generally this is a labor-liberal city.  It=s not a liberal-liberal city. It=s like Brooklyn, kind of, or at least the general tone of things feels like that.

Las Vegas has a lot in common with LA. It=s got a very coherent atomic culture. The Hawaiian culture is influential. There=s the Greek Orthodox church. There=s a big Jewish-Catholic influence, but what’s left of it is kind of old. Chinese is a pretty big culture here. There=s evidently now a growing Portuguese-Chinese culture and all of the Cubans that came over here when they closed the casinos--and the Mormons of course. There=s a Mediterranean ambiance that I seem to see everywhere. There=s an extreme permissiveness, you know?

I don=t think it=ll last to be honest. I think the government will ultimately tax gaming returns and then they=ll institute a state income tax. I=ve found it to be interesting in the sense that it is the most American place I=ve ever been, in the sense that America=s an economic society. There=s not much of your religious right, there=s not much of your woozy Teddy Kennedy Left. It=s mostly labor and capitalist and that=s about it. One of the nice things about Vegas is that, even though it fails, it at least aspires to art, but it=s not really higher culture.

Cites:

Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter. (2001, July 8). Taking a Critic at his Word; Dave Hickey has a low            Opinion Biennials. So When Asked to Organize One, He Aimed High. Los Angeles Times, Calendar, p. 4. [ BACK ]

Hick or Hickey?, (2001, August 4). Books & Art. The Economist. [ BACK ]

Tolson, Jay. (June 11, 2001). The Face of the Future? U.S. News & World Report, 48-56. [ BACK ]