Rachel Wetzler at Artforum:
Writing in 1993, the late critic Dave Hickey described beauty as a kind of dirty word in the art world, believed to be hopelessly tainted by the market: “Beautiful art sells. If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells something else, it is a seductive advertisement.” Perhaps the clearest sign of beauty’s shifting fortune is the rehabilitation of Hickey’s own critical reputation. In his introduction to the 2023 reissue of his 1993 collection The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, he describes the paradoxical combination of renown and revulsion with which his work was met: “In the Dragon’s wake,” he writes, “the endowed lecturer was deposited unceremoniously at a Ramada Inn beside an empty highway and left to dine out of the candy machine.” (Indeed, I recall being assigned an essay from the book in a methods seminar during my first semester of graduate school back in 2010, where it was cast as a brash and unserious provocation.) But returning to The Invisible Dragon now, in anticipation of the new collection of his writings Feint of Heart, posthumously published by David Zwirner Books this past September, I wonder if he wasn’t on to something. For Hickey, the invocation of beauty didn’t represent a conservative retrenchment, but an appealing anarchy: It directly addresses itself to the beholder, requiring neither interpretive intermediaries nor ameliorative social purpose.
more here.
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