The Invisible Dragon, Dave Hickey

I am thinking about Interior Design, Commercial Colour and Painting. Specifically where those disciplines/metrics overlap and merge as well as diverge, and most importantly why that is.

Therefore I thought it might be good to read a book which talks to beauty's value in Fine Art from a critic's perspective. Below is a breakdown of the book, with quotes. Through this breakdown I hope to understand more fully Dave Hickey's position and my own.

The book has five chapters which are independent essays's by Dave Hickey:

1. Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty

2. Nothing like the Son: On Robert Mapplethorpe's X Portfolio

3. Prom Night in Flatland: On the Gender of Works of Art

4. After the Great Tsunami: On Beauty and the Therapeutic Institution

5. American Beauty

Chapter 1: 'Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty', talks to the idea that the critical vernacular of beauty is lacking in the Fine Art sphere of understanding. Hickey talks about how conversation around beauty in the 90's ignited conversation about the commercial selling of works rather than as he says, "the subversive potential of visual pleasure" His thoughts are expressed in an honest and emphatic way.

He says:

"Is the institution itself not a marketplace?"

"Beautiful art sells. If it sells itself it is an idolatrous commodity: if it sells something else, it is a seductive advertisement."

"Art is either a democratic political instrument or it is not"

He ends this first chapter by acknowledging that artist's such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol and Edward Ruscha all have used the vernacular of beauty to ignite change.

Chapter 2: Nothing like the Son: On Robert Mapplethorpe's 'X Portfolio

"These images are too full of art to be "about" it" -Dave Hickey

In this chapter Hickey compares Maplethorpe's X Portfolio with the likes of Caravagio and even Shakespeare's Sonnets. He says, "Images like Robert Maplethorpe's 'X Portfolio' and texts like Shakespeares Sonnets, however, tilt the altars at which we worship by making them all seem probable. In doing so they collapse and conflate the hierarchies of our response to sex, art, and religion and in the process, generate considerable anxiety."

Chapter 3: From Night in Flatland: On the Gender of Works of Art

This chapter begins with Hickey saying:

"I am certain of one thing: Images can change the world. I have seen it happen. I have experienced the "Before and After", as Andy might say, so I know that images can alter the visual construction of the reality that we all inhabit."

and then,

"It should be clear by now that over the last four-hundred-odd years, the "work of art," and particularly the painting, has undergone a number of perceptual gender shifts. The demonic of Vasari's time invested work with attributes traditionally characterised as "feminine": beauty, harmony, generosity. Modern critical language validates works on the basis of their "masculine" characteristics: strength, singularity, autonomy. Second, I am suggesting that the dynamics of these gender shifts presuppose that the gender of the artist and the beholder are not shifting, which of course they are. Third, I am suggesting that, since the rhetoric of flatness applies primarily to painting, the "death of painting" in the late 1960s and the rise of the three-dimensional, photographic, and time-based genres marked nothing more than a growing discomfort with the mythologies of "modern painting," which in fact have less to do with the paintings themselves than the critical language used to defend them."

Hickey argues that the "feminine" qualities are still present in works of art, but they are just not acknowledged by our language of value. Hickey talks to the continual shift of values of gender on painting. He states that the death of modern painting signifies the rebellion against the above mentioned gendered assumptions.

Chapter 4: After the great Tsunami: On Beauty and the Therapeutic Institution

He starts with:

"The subject here is "beauty" -not what it is but what it does- its rhetorical function in our discourse with images." He then explains his definition of the "therapeutic institution", which are the museums, universities, bureaus, foundations, publications and endowments.

and then,

"-because as long as nothing but "the beautiful" is rendered "beautifully," there is no friction, no subversive pleasure, and things so not change."

"For nearly seventy years, throughout the adolescence of what we call high modernism, professors, curators, and academicians could only wring their hands and weep at the spectacle of an exploding culture in the sway of painters, dealers, critics, shop-keepers, second sons, Russian epicures, Spanish parvenus, and American expatriates."

And on loaning work to a museum for exhibit he says, "Visiting the exhibition can feel like visiting an old friend in jail. The work hangs there among a population of kindred offenders, bereft of its eccentricity, yet somehow, on account of that loss, newly invested with a faintly ominous kind of parochial power."

Hickey uses Gilles Deleuze's 1967 essay "Coldness and Cruelty", to clarify an analogy he is making between his ideas of beauty within his "therapeutic institution" and the unpacking of the concept of sadomasochism by Deleuze. Hickey quotes Deleuze, "Deleuze notes, "the sadist is in need of institions" and "the masochist of contractual relations."

This is his analogy:

"The rhetoric of beauty tells the story of those beholders who, like Masoch's victim, contract their own submission -having established, by free consent, a reciprocal, contractual alliance with the image."

Hickey believes that the experience of artwork within his concept of the therapeutic institution is presumed to be an end in itself, whereas the artwork might behold some consequence, "beyond the encounter"

"Thus has the traditional, contractual alliance between the image and its beholder (of which beauty is the signature, and in which there is no presumption of received virtue) been supplanted by a hierarchical one between art, presumed virtuous, and a beholder presumed to be in need of it. This is the signature of the therapeutic institution"

Chapter 5: 'American Beauty'

"Beauty is and always will be blue skies and an open highway"

In this last chapter Hickey talks to his last four essays which were written twenty years prior to this last one. He speaks about the negative reaction he received after writing them, and then clarifies further those overlapping points which can be found throughout his essays.

He says:

"Since that time, our propensity to squabble about the relationship of beauty of things has become inextricably entangled in the folkways of the mercantile republics in which these squabbles first flourished. They are equally indebted to the conventions of republican democracy, to the dynamics of commerce, and to our residual pagan penchant for investing objects with certain power."

and,

"The simple act of "liking" something bears with it the inference that we have recognised our "likeness" in the world beyond ourselves -Something to our taste, like a muffin."

"Even today, the phrases "craven idolatry" and "commodity fetishism" may be substituted for

one another with no loss of sense. Artists and art-lovers alike still implore us to drive the money changers from the temple of art -even though there is no such temple, nor has there ever been."

":..which I would like passionately to defend -the idea that the power of art may come from its beholders."

"In this exact sense, choosing beauty over content (or choosing beauty as content) is always an act of sedition."