Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art

“Dave Hickey’s lifetime of stops and starts, ‘three fourths of a disaster,’ produced a brambly, bubbly body of work that ranges from Flaubert to Liberace and from Hank Williams to Michelangelo. It’s the kind of legacy that demands an explanation, and Daniel Oppenheimer provides a brilliant one. Hickey is beautiful—and so is this book.”
-Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sontag: Her Life and Work

“The never-to-be-completed mosaic that is Dave Hickey’s life and work gains some beautifully hand-crafted tiles from Daniel Oppenheimer. His authorial voice—open, intimate, probing—is the perfect vehicle for plumbing the depths of Hickey’s overall essentialness. I devoured it.”
-Steven Soderbergh, Academy Award-winning film director

Regarded as both a legend and a villain, critic Dave Hickey has inspired generations of artists, art critics, musicians, and writers. His 1993 book The Invisible Dragon became a cult hit for its potent and provocative critique of the art establishment and its call to reconsider the role of beauty in art. His next book, 1997’s Air Guitar, introduced a new kind of cultural criticism--simultaneously insightful, complicated, vulnerable, and down-to-earth--that propelled Hickey to fame as an iconoclastic thinker, loved and loathed in equal measure, whose influence extended beyond the art world.

Far from Respectable, forthcoming from University of Texas Press in spring 2021, is a focused, evocative exploration of Hickey’s work, his impact on the field of art criticism, and the man himself, from his Huck Finn childhood to his drug-fueled periods as both New York gallerist and Nashville songwriter to, finally, his anointment as a tenured professor and MacArthur Genius. Drawing on in-person interviews with Hickey, his friends and family, and art world comrades and critics, the author examines the controversial writer’s distinctive takes on a broad range of subjects, including Normal Rockwell, Robert Mapplethorpe, academia, Las Vegas, basketball, country music, and others, and considers how Hickey and his vision of an “ethical, cosmopolitan paganism” built around a generous definition of art is more urgent than ever.

If you’re interested in a review copy of Far From Respectable, get in touch with Joel Pinckney at jpinckney@utpress.utexas.edu