dave hickey explains it all, pt. 2 [book it]

(continued from previous post, "dave hickey explains it all")

Have you heard of Dave Hickey? I came across him this weekend in the Los Angeles Times' occasional Sunday magazine, LA (why this paper can't manage a Sunday magazine of any consistency or caliber like its pretentious New York competitor is beyond me, but that is a matter for its own diatribe). Inspired by the brief interview, I picked up Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy, the 1997 collection of cultural commentary that helped him earn a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 2001, and can assure you after a premliminary perusal -- it's worth a read.

- thoughts, quotes, SPOILERS -

A Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz

Okay, first off, what a deliciously fitting title. How better to reference today's gaudy mecca of excessive American play-time (Las Vegas) than by referencing a celebrated partaker of bygone American excess (F. Scott Fitzgerald and his short story, "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz," from the 20's)? Dave Hickey's deep fondness for Las Vegas is cerebral and sharp and not without condescension, but his attachment has more emotional texture than mere irony. He compares the Strip's neon lights against the backdrop of a desert sunset:

"Friends of mine who visit watch this light show with different eyes. They prefer the page of the landscape to the text of the neon. They seem to think it's more "authentic." I, on the other hand, suspect that "authenticity" is altogether elsewhere -- that they are responding to nature's ability to mimic the sincerity of a painting, that the question of the sunset and The Strip is more a matter of one's taste in duplicity. One either prefers the honest fakery of the neon or the fake honesty of the sunset -- the undisguised artifice of culture or the cultural construction of "authenticity." [bold mine]

I'm not clear on the bleak asssertion midway through that nature "mimics the sincerity of a painting" -- I think he means that our reading of nature as "authentic" is a cultural label, not that the sunset has any agency to actively mimic art -- but that last bit is the perfect closing zinger of a smug, minutiae-minded college prof.  Love it. (Check out Orson Welles' meandering F is for Fake for an extended exploration of the fake/authentic binary)

Hickey then goes on to happily dissect and savor the "amazing" Liberace museum.

Liberace, it seems, serves as a poetic example of authenticity debunked because "everything that Liberace created or caused to be crated as a function of his shows or of his showmanship (his costumes, his cars, his jewelry, his candelabra, his pianos) shiens with a crisp, pop authority [...] while everything he purchased out of his rising slum-kid appetite for "Old World" charm and ancien regime legitimacy (everything "real," in other words) looks unabashedly phony." By virtue of personality and vision, Liberace created his own visual world, in which only his designs and creations are really legit. 

But Liberace's vision wasn't quite meta. He didn't "understand his own radicality" -- 

"He had, after all, purchased the 1962 Rolls Rocye Phantom v Landau sitting out in the driveway (one of seven ever made), then made it disappear -- let it dissolve into a cubist dazzle of reflected desert by completely covering it with hundreds of thousands of tiny mirrored mosaic tiles -- a gesture comparable to Rauschenberg erasing a de Kooning. But Lee didn't get that."

Or does this choice quote reserve as adequate summation? "Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else's privilege; Liberace cultivated them both in equal parks and often to disastrous effect."

Hickey goes on to look over the cultural implications of Liberace as closeted gay mega-star, even comparing him to the lofty likes of Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward, pedigreed icons of eras past who were also officially closeted (interesting sidenote: could Wilde have really "invented the closet as a mode of subversive public/private existence"? Hey, undergrads -- sounds like a possible thesis paper to me).  

Liberace progresses the closet tradition. In fact, what he did was "Americanize the closet, democratize it, fit it out with transparent walls, take it up on stage and demand our complicity in his "open secret." [...] Liberace's closet was as democratically invisible as the emperor's new clothes, and just as revolutionary. Everybody "got it." But nobody said it."

And this is where the essay drives and finally rests, a lovely coming together of authenticity, meaning and cultural dialogue: 

"I think we can regard the Liberace Museum as having some general historical significance beyond the enshrining of a particularly exotic entertainer. Its artifacts, genuine rhinestones, and imitation pearls alike mark an American moment - the beginning of the end of the "open secret" So the cars and the costumes and the silly pianos might be seen as more than just the memorabilia of an exotic saloon singer: because they are, in fact, the tools with which Liberace took the "rehtoric of the closet" public, demosntrated the power of its generous duplicity, and changed the world."

Were I Liberace, I don't think I could fathom a more blushing ode to my legacy.