Dave Hickey Art Quotations

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.

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

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 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.

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

With the artists, I don't teach, I coach. I can't tell them how to make art. I tell them to make more art. I tell them to get up early and stay up late. I tell them not to quit. I tell them if somebody else is already making their work. My job is to be current with the discourse and not be an asshole. That's all I wanted in a professor.

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