dave hickey explains it all, pt. 3 [book it]

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 -

The Birth of the Big, Beautiful Art Market

Dave Hickey loves cars, and it's been an on-going affair. As a kid he would plug into car culture wherever his family moved, and he outlines this as the foundation for his art criticism with sharp and lovely brevity:

"Wherever I found myself, kids bought [cars], talked them, drew them, and dreamed them -- hopped them up and dropped them down -- cruised them on the drag and dragged them on the highway, and I did, too. Thus, of necessity, I learned car math and car engineering, car poli-sci and car economics, car anthropology and car beaux-arts.

Even my first glimmerings of higher theory arose out of that culture: the rhetoric of image and icon, the dynamics of embodied desire, the algorithms of style change, and the ideological force of disposable income. All these came to me couched in the lingua franca of cars."

He writes with such force and clarity that I find myself relating to experiences I've never had. It gives a fresh perspective on how hobbies shape and specialize you, and the different narrative and sociological threads that form any social experience or currency.

"All of us who partook of this discourse [...] understood its politico-aesthetic implications, understood that we were voting with our cars. [...] We also understood that we were dissenting when we customized them and hopped them up - demonstrating against the standards of the republic and advocating our own refined vision of power and loveliness."

This collection's art and democracy premise has seem rather vague and shaky to me in previous entries, but Hickey really brings it home and makes it count in this essay. I'll need to dig up what he says about Internet zines and social networking artwork/projects (like JPG), because it seems like contemporary culture's crystallization of his point.

"My optimum set of wheels, then, looked and sounded like a high-performance production model from a company you never fucking hear of -- as if I had walked into a Dave dealership one afternoon and bought it off the showroom floor--and now you wanted to buy one, too. That was my idea of cool."

This, then, is the beating heart of the designer -- a unique creation in which others see such value that it becomes a commodity. Is that art and democracy, or art and economy? [sidenote: this is the kind of true car-love by which the Fast & Furious films could enormously benefit if that just gave it some intellectual weight]

Hickey goes on to poke fun at how the new art establishment oddlly reveres the pop art 60s for "commercialization" whie, in fact:

"Works of art, after all, had been commercial objects for two hundred years, but commercial objects, like the cars we loved, had only recently become works of art -- and they did so in response to the market conditions that would ultimately create the post-industrail world. As Warhol was fond of telling us, the strange thing about the sixties was not that Western art was becoming commercialized but that Western commerce was becoming so much more artistic."

This guy is pretty much the coolest professor I never had. He then goes on to explain the artistic and economic implications of the evolution of differently priced lines by a single label, using the GM tailfin as an example of how to diversify your market and create loyalty to the brand:

"The tailfin technology, say, that had become stylistically obsolete on the Cadillac, could be retooled and used to produce Oldsmobiles, then Buicks, then Pontiacs, then Chevrolets, by which time it had been totally redesigned. From a marketing point of view, it was heaven. It bound consumers to the parent company and invited them to make incremental steps up the price ladder, as the exquisite, finny grail gradually descended toward their aspiring spirit."

The rest of the essay devolves into a wildly diverse philosophical rant against the high culture of the last few decades by citing the car as intellectual meeting of the Baroque and Enlightenment, the Catholic and Protestant, while also tracing hispanic culture's love for customizing it to a romantic Spanish heritage and basically refuting the notion that the aesthetics of car culture is low. I think. The essay is honestly a bit murky on the back end. but its core themes of democracy by commodification and dissent by modification ring clear and true.

Related:

dave hickey explains it all, pt. 1

dave hickey explains it all, pt. 2

max perkins: portrait of an artist's best friend [book it]

As Stephanie Meyers continues her demoralizing, months-long domination of the bestsellers lists (btw which is not to say that Twilight the movie isn't a joyful cultural landmark of epic, straight-faced campiness -- and the only film I saw twice last year), let us reflect on a more stirring era in book publishing. 

Yes, I'm biased towards the 20s. Fitzgerald and Hemingway may be English dusty class perennials, but I say that status is well-earned. Their two peak creations -- The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises, respectively -- are short and bittersweet works of singular soul. Beyond the iconic styles of the authors themselves (and of course I don't ever mean to sell a writer short), the world perhaps truly owes those final products to one Max Perkins, the longtime Scribner's editor who not only signed these and other fledgling literary lions, but shined their work to a fine polish.

A. Scott Berg's well-received 1978 biography of Perkins, the rather hyperbolically titled Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, presents the man as a quiet behind-the-scenes type with a gut feeling for writing talent and an even more impressive patience for shepherding it along. Fitzergald in particular benefitted from Perkins' seemingly infinite benevolence, and not only from extensive page-by-page editing sessions and title recommendations (Gatsby might have otherwise been titled Among the Ash-Heaps and Millionaires or, oy, Trimalchio in West Egg). Fitzgerald also relied on Perkins to dole out his pay in allowance-like installments, the famously excessive author being perhaps chemically incapable of living within means.

Perkins came from two distinguished two England lines, the Perkins and the Evarts. He had five daughters, a mildly tense marriage, and a deep fondness for the family summer home up in Windsor, VT (a relaxed, good-living state which, I might add, also gives me the warm fuzzies). But my favorite bit of biography concerns his quarter-century correspondence with one Elizabeth Lemmon (another Liz Lemon! Ha. If you don't watch 30 Rock, excuse the interruption), a family acquaintance who ended up serving Perkins in an odd -- and chaste -- confidant capacity. A lovely blonde with a rolling Virginia estate, Elizabeth was a distant, elusive ideal for a man who already harbored a sentimental taste for Venus (a three-foot version of the Venus di Milo stood in his front hall for decades); she was "an oasis of warmth and understanding in an increasingly difficult marriage." The relationship, it seems, did stick to letters, but its existence gives Perkins another shade, as well as underscores the many private connections that people pursue, quietly treasure, and even require. And how appropriate, that a man of letters who shied from the public eye, would conduct his greatest emotional affair with the pen alone. 

I'll leave you with this small Perkins observation, noted in a complaining letter to Lemmon in the midst of a dull Atlantic crossing: "The ocean doesn't even give a sense of immensity because you can clearly see the edge, equally distant in every direction. The ocean is a disc." Perkins was a keenly perceptive man, and it was that fine eye for detail that effectively mediated between his era's literary talent and the masterworks we still revere today. 

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.

dave hickey explains it all [book it]

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 -

Unbreak My Heart, An Overture (introduction)

"In truth, I have never taken anything printed in a book to heart that was not somehow confirmed in my ordinary experience -- and that did not, to some extent, reform and redeem that experience. nor have I had any experience of high art that was not somehow confirmed in my experience of ordinary culture -- and that did not, to some extent, reform and redeem that. So I have tried to reinstate the connective tissues here, and, in the process, have written an odd sort of memoir: a memoir without tears, without despair or exaltation -- a memoir purged of those time-stopping exclamation points that punctuate all our lives." (italics mine)

I love that description for a collection of cultural essays -- an odd sort of memoir. Isn't that, in effect, what this blogging thing is? What our home librairies and DVD collections and CD stacks truly represent? Going back over old favorites is like looking through old photos; taste, and its evolution, is a form of biography perhaps as meaningful as any other. 

Hickey then plunges into a meaningful comparison between two camps of cultural observers, each considering itself to be the true custodian of Culture -- mom-and-pop shop operators (galleries, record stores, jazz clubs, etc), vs. ivory tower academics. It's not hard to see which side Hickey comes out on, and his characterizations are unfairly stark, but the opposition is relevant all the same.

"The problem for me had never been who sold the dumb object, or bought it (it was just a dumb object), but how you acquire the privilege of talking about it -- how you found poeple with whom you could talk about it...That was the best thing about little stores. If you were a nobody like me, and didn't know anything, you could go into one of them and find things out. People would talk to you, not because you were going to buy something, but because they loved the stuff they had to sell. The guy in the Billabong Surf Shop, I can assure you, wants to talk about his boards. Even if you want to buy one, right now, he still wants to talk about them, will talk you out into the street, you with the board under your ar, if he is a true child of the high water."

Notice, too, how Hickey freely files surf boards under Cultural Objects right along with vinyl. They are crafted and loved and collected like any other cultural passion.

"And I love that kind of talk, have lived on it and lived by it, writing that kind of talk for magazines. To me, it has always been the heart of the mystery, the heart of the heart: the way people talk about loving things, which things, and why."

That could pretty much be the description of this blog. When I worked for a publication's arts section, the great pleasure was coming in and shooting the shit with my colleagues, re-hashing the same points perhaps, feeling my own vehemently expressed opinions crystalize and then shatter. Writing was the chore -- the bread. That banter was the butter.

"Thus it was, after two years on university campuses without hearing anything approximating this kind of talk, I began feeling terrible, physically awful, confused and bereft. I kept trying to start this kind of talk, volunteering my new enthusiasms like a kid pulling frogs and magic rocks out of his pocket, but nothing worked. There was no bounce, just aridity and suspicion. It finally dawned on me that in this place that we had set aside to nurture culture and study its workings, culture didn't work. It couldn't work, in this place, because all the things that I wanted to talk about...belonged to someone. But not to everyone. All the treasures of culture were divvied up and owned by professors, as certainly as millionaires own the beach-fronts of Maine."

Hickey is a wonderfully succinct writer, eschewing technical jargon for plain rhythm and imagery without losing any effectiveness (hey, Chuck Klosterman, take note). Don't get me wrong, he's no saint -- isn't is a bit old to so fervently hate the Establishment by now? -- but he does what the best cultural writers do: he feels his subjects. He loves them. 

I'll leave you with a little left-field snippet, a quote that, while mildly out-of-context, demonstrates his comedy as well as his eye:

"[It was a] cool, windy afternoon in the zocalo of a little town on the slopes above Mexico City. I was sitting in a shady arcade with my old friend Brownie, who isn't called that anymore, since he is presently in the Federal Witness Protection Program. We were down in Mexico on a nefarious errand that doubtless contributed to Brownie's uncomfortable accomodation with the Feds, but, on this afternoon, nothing very nefarious was going on. We were just sitting at a little table, shooting nothing but the breeze and enjoying the air. Brownie was drinking a beer. I was drinking coffee. At one point, Brownie reached over and touched my arm, nodding at something in the square behind me. I turned around and beheld a perfect Latin American tableau.

On the edge of the curb, on the other side of the square, three people were standing in a row. There was a boy of about seventeen, wearing a cheap black suit, a white shirt, and a narrow black tie. Beside him was a beautiful girl of about the same age, in a white lace dress, and, beside her, a duenna in full balck battle-regalia with a mantilla over her hair. The duenna was a large woman, and looked for all the world like Dick Butkus in drag. The three of them had been about to cross the street into the plaza when they found their way blocked. Now, they were just standing there, at a loss, lined up on te curb with two dirt-brown dogs fucking the street in front of them."

PICK UP THIS BOOK.