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.
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