Yeah, right. On Dave Hickey, the value of frivolity, and the delusions and counter-delusions of politics in art

Dave is queer and not queer, as needed

This is the third installment of a Substack colloquium on the 30th anniversary edition of Dave Hickey’s seminal 1993 work The Invisible Dragon. It began with

Blake Smith

’s"Dave Hickey, That Queer," and continued with

John Pistelli

’s "Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty and Other Matters."

Paul Franz

will be dropping in soon as well.

—-

Swag from the Invisible Dragon launch party in L.A.

In his essay “Frivolity and Unction,” from his extraordinary 1997 collection Air Guitar, the essayist and critic Dave Hickey proposes that we (writers, artists, etc.) stop thinking about our work as potentially important to the world and accept instead that it’s frivolous, of no intrinsic use to anyone other than ourselves. He writes:

Music and movie people are not in denial about the frivolity of their endeavor, while the contemporary art world, like the French Academy, feels called upon to maintain the aura of spectacular unction that signifies public virtue, in hopes of maintaining its public patronage. ... So here’s my suggestion: At this moment, with public patronage receding like the spring tide anyway and democracy supposedly proliferating throughout the art world, why don’t all of us art-types summon up the moral courage to admit that what we do has no intrinsic value or virtue—that it has its moments and it has its functions, but otherwise, all things considered, in its ordinary state, unredeemed by courage and talent, it is a bad, silly, frivolous thing to do. We could do this, you know. And those moments and those functions would not be diminished in the least.

The passage isn't really an argument that art isn't of any intrinsic value, though it can be read that way if you move too quickly through it. The point instead is that it would be helpful for us as artists to act as though we’re frivolous, as though we’re just doing our silly little thing which is of no value to anyone else. From that position, a few good things are likely to follow. We will stop behaving with so much solemnity and self-regard about our endeavor, and therefore be much less annoying to other people. We will be more honest with ourselves about why we make art (because it’s fun or satisfying or might get us status or get us laid). We will make better art and have more fun making it. And the art that we will make in this mode, without so many illusions about its necessity or virtue, will be far more likely to change the world in some fashion. It is only this kind of art, made without any sense of responsibility to anything other than the artist’s desires and perversities, that brings new possibility into the world.

Of the many great gifts that Dave’s writing has given to me, this permission to do what I'm’ doing for my own reasons is perhaps the one for which I’m most grateful. As I wrote in my 2021 book, Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art: “He had deflated me and liberated me. Nobody cared whether I dedicated myself to writing. It was a selfish, superfluous thing to do, and one that deserved no presumption of virtue.” If no one else cares about my art—if what I do as an artist makes no difference at all—then I may as well just do what I want. This doesn’t apply, of course, to my obligations as a father, husband, brother, son, citizen, employee, etc., but that’s just fine. Virtue in my life, selfishness in my art. 

I say this now in part just to say it, because I find it pleasurable to write. But also, ironically, because I have some political skin in the game when it comes to the particular topic under discussion, which is the 30th anniversary edition of The Invisible Dragon, the predecessor text to Air Guitar and perhaps the single more important work of art criticism in the last 50 years.

I want Dave to be read as widely and enthusiastically as possible, because I think the more people there are who are reading him, and in particular the more artists out there reading him, the better it will be for our culture. I want Dave to win. Or maybe I should say, and in this sense there’s nothing at all ironic about my desire to be political, I want to win.

This was another of Dave’s central arguments, that a great deal of what we’re doing when we're talking or arguing about the culture we love (think the dudes at the record store in High Fidelity, endlessly arguing about their obscure tastes as if everything depends upon it) is behaving politically. We are making a case for the “Eden” we’d like to live in. Consciously or not, we are talking about these things because we believe that by doing so, we’re making it marginally more likely that our particular Eden will come into existence, or at a minimum that our little space within the larger world will become more edenic.

There’s a subtle but all-important distinction, then, between the kind of artistic stance that Dave was warning us against, which involves persuading ourselves that we’re making art for the sake of others, and the politics implicit in making art or writing criticism or shooting the shit about obscure music because we selfishly want to make the world a different place than it is, because then it would be a place more suited to our own enjoyment or fulfillment.

I think of Dave’s epic and unanswerable “Yeah right” early in Invisible Dragon, as he’s reflecting on the delusions of an art critical establishment that’s so dedicated to exposing the veiled material and political interests of past culture and so blind to its own interests in the present:

At a time when easily sixty percent of historical criticism concerns itself with the influence of taste, patronage, and the canons of acceptability upon the images that a culture produces, the bulk of contemporary criticism, in a miasma of hallucinatory denial satisfies itself with grousing about “the corruption of the market.” The transactions of value enacted under the patronage of our new, “nonprofit” institutions are exempted from this cultural critique, presumed to be untainted, redemptive, disinterested, taste-free, and politically benign. Yeah, right.

The charge for Dave wasn’t to be apolitical, it was to be properly political, which is to say in touch with (consciously or not; it didn’t really matter) one’s own desires, interests, and will-to-power. This is necessary pre-amble, I think, to considering what is clearly the key rhetorical/political shift in the new edition of The Invisible Dragon, which is editor Gary Kornblau’s efforts in his foreword and afterword to the volume to “queer” Dave Hickey. As Gary writes in the foreword:

I intersperse orphaned texts among Dragon’s essays on beauty to create an alternative narrative. In the afterword, I recall the brash, heterosexual author and me as the most unlikely of queer pals. (I “queer” Dave Hickey, in the argot of the day.) I situate the meanings of Dragon within the trauma of the AIDS plague, where the book first found its footing. For me—even more so as I age—Dragon makes beauty visible under the looming presence of death and bodily decay. I remix and embed unapologetically to keep Hickey’s renegade spirit alive. 

Gary, then, is doing something explicitly political in this work, both by adding his own writing in which he straightforwardly makes the case for a queer Dave Hickey and with his editorial choices about which previously uncollected Hickey work to add to the new edition. It is no accident that among the new stuff are essays about Dolly Parton (an icon to queers and feminists), Richard Pryor (a black icon, and a slightly swishy one), and John Rechy, a pioneering gay writer.

It’s a calculating maneuver to make Dave more acceptable to an art world that would be conditioned to be suspicious of (white, male, straight) Dave even if he weren’t also associated, disastrously but not entirely unfairly, with a conservative-coded critique of the art world and even if he hadn’t specifically gone out of his way, on many occasions, to alienate the art world people Gary is hoping to enlist in the Dave project. (There's a great book that gets into all of these art world politics, if you’re interested.)

Of Dave’s first essay for Art issues, the magazine that Gary founded and edited, Gary writes:

Dave’s essay on Siegfried & Roy (titled “Lost Boys”) provided the first hint of what struck me as a queer sensibility in much of Dave's writing, one I would come to know better as the years progressed. Careful not to reduce aesthetic issues to mere style ... I think queer in its manifold meanings: unconventional or off-kilter; questionable or suspicious; and living life outside social norms in regard to gender, sexuality, or ways of being-in-the-world. I recognized the sensibility the first moment I glanced over the typewritten pages that were sputtering through the fax machine. 

Is this true? Is Dave, properly understood, a queer writer? This is one of the questions that Blake Smith addresses in his essay that led off our discussion. His answer is a complicated but definitive no. The problem for Blake isn’t so much that Kornblau failed to play by the established rules of queering various writers or texts, but that the whole queering-of-things-not-obviously-queer endeavor is flawed at the root. Blake writes:

What we have ... is a ‘queer’ project out to sneakily and incoherently try to combine

1. The promotion of the well-being—or at least the cultural visibility of certain—sexual minorities (some more than others)

2. The celebration of the anti-normative sexual energies (wrongly! contingently!) identified with those minorities

3. A progressive egalitarian politics that, of course, does not actually believe in doing away with norms or with insiders-and-outsiders, but which merely, qua political movement, wants to erect a new set of rules and distinctions said to be more inclusive and humane but which, necessarily (and I’m not saying this is even a bad thing, but just a feature of our being human) rewrite the terms of normativity and queerness, making, as I’ve said elsewhere, supposedly ‘queer’ progressives into the normative subjects and the erstwhile normative ones into the ‘new queers’

This sort of tragically ubiquitous guff is what Gary Kornblau ... ropes Hickey into in his afterword, making the critic out to have been not just a straight gay who shared ... a particular way of appreciating excess that we might call camp ... but the sort of 1-2-3 Queer Inc mush, such that Hickey’s delight in Liberace, Mapplethorpe, etc., starts to sound like a lib-lady-who-lunches gushing about the ‘importance’ of protecting Drag Queen Story Hour. ... Getting Hickey republished and read by a new audience means mispackaging him as an Ally and his enjoyment as Political(ly Good).

I have two thoughts about this. One is that Blake is probably right that “queering” a subject has become a convenient, politically advantageous stratagem for writing about aspects of sex and sexuality that are pretty universal. And he may be right (this is beyond my theoretical pay grade, honestly) that what’s being specifically elided in the queering of Dave is precisely the erotic charge of his straightness, his machismo, his cowboyitude, all the things that are only queer if we evacuate queer utterly of its LGBTQitude.

As Blake puts it, “somehow in the abstract being transgressive and sexual can be championed as anti-normative because I guess we’re imagining some oppressed marginal abject person doing it, but when a straight guy is going hubba-hubba over Dolly’s tits-and-smile then the jig is up!” To queer Dave, then, isn’t just to participate in a slightly fraudulent enterprise, but it is also to misunderstand his particular potency and appeal, including his very straight appeal to the gays.

The other thought I have, vis a vis Blake on Gary on Dave, is that I don't care. Or rather, I care about Blake's argument because a) it's expressed in a way that I find pleasurable to read (good writing!), b) it opens up new avenues for intellection that I expect I will find rewarding to engage in or observe (exciting thinking!), and c) it may make it incrementally more likely for Blake’s Eden, which I take to be a world in which there's less of the "1-2-3 Queer Inc mush," to come into existence, and I'm rather drawn to that Eden (les bullshit!). BUT d) I also fully support Gary's queering of Dave, for what are in fact a quite similar set of reasons. 

Does Gary’s queering of Dave has some theoretical fragilities? Sure. Is Gary’s queering of Dave interesting? Is it compelling? Does it make me sit up a little straighter (so to speak) in my seat? Does it make my pants crackle? I think so. Does Gary’s queer Dave Eden make my Eden slightly more likely? My instinct is yes, and so I’m on board for that reason too, though with my eyes open. I’m a charter member of the Dave project. I wrote a book on the guy. I did it frivolously, in pursuit of selfish creative and intellectual satisfaction as well as the modest but real prestige boost of having published two (count ‘em 2) books rather just one. But I also hoped it would make other people more likely to read and be influenced by his writing, and therefore more likely to be voluntary citizens of my Eden.

A big part of me doesn’t care if Gary is “right” about Dave. I care if it works. Can we improve Dave’s brand so that more people will allow themselves to encounter his writing, which if they have any openness at all, if they’re not totally lost to the dogma, will have a really good chance of fucking them up, discombobulating their categories, detaching them from some of the soul-deadening orthodoxies of our current moment? Does Gary’s queering of Dave allow that writer for Artforum to review the book? Does it give him cover with his friends to give column inches to Dave? If so, then I’m for it. Particularly if it’s interesting to read, as IMO it is. But Blake is too. And John.

Finally, here’s a photo from the L.A. launch party for the new edition of the book. Gary’s visible toward the center in the pink jacket. It was a lovely afternoon.