Three newer things /  by Daniel Oppenheimer

Most of my writing these days is on my Substack, Eminent Americans, but I’m still publishing the occasional freelance piece. These three are my most recent:

The first is on venture capitalist extraordinaire Ben Horowitz and his recent turn toward Trump after a lifetime of supporting Democrats. The second is about my personal experience of working to get the name of my kids’ elementary school changed. And the third is a reflection on the malign influence of Rush Limbaugh.

Review of David Mamet Book /  by Daniel Oppenheimer

I wrote about David Mamet’s rather atrocious new book for the Washington Post. A sample:

Mamet in “Recessional” is a lazy writer. There are charming passages here and there, particularly when he’s reflecting on his professional experience or musing on the challenges of being an artist. But there’s a slapdash quality to it all, an unearned confidence that his writerly instincts are so potent that a few anecdotes or observations strung together, tied up at the end with a callback to the beginning, will naturally coalesce into profundity. That associative, jump-cutting style can work, but you have to know how to do it, and even then you have to work at it. Mamet seems beyond working at it, and I presume beyond receiving or accepting honest feedback from editors or friends.

Three more late stage reviews /  by Daniel Oppenheimer

Julia Friedman in the Atheneum Review goes into extraordinary depth on the book, Hickey’s work, and broader issues in the art world.

Far From Respectable makes an excellent case for reading Dave Hickey again. The corrosive model which prioritizes virtue over art has been failing us for at least three decades by suppressing heterodox artists. The only winner in this unfortunate experiment, in which art is assumed to be downstream from justice, is the art market. Its explosive growth over the same period of thirty of so years, correlates precisely with the growth of the therapeutic institutions. As the quest for righteousness shrunk the space formerly taken up by aesthetics, rampant financial speculation and insider trading moved in to fill the vacuum. Oppenheimer’s book is more than an homage to Hickey. It is also a reminder that the imperative of virtue-signaling is fundamentally at odds with “the cultivation and flourishing of eccentric, subversive impulses that [have] the potential to remake the whole society from the outside in.” Hickey’s writings remind us why we might want to participate in an earnest and vulnerable art world, in which outsiders can still bond over beauty.

Scott Beauchamp likes the book a lot, at the Kirk Center website, though he also says, hilariously, that some of my defense of Hickey is “at least half warmed-over crap.” I’ll accept it.

Far from Respectable is a wonderful book that provides the most eloquent explanation of Hickey you’ll ever have the pleasure to read. And if you want to understand the culture of the latter half of the twentieth century from the inside, you have to read Hickey. You should also read him for pleasure. Joy, even. But most importantly, you should read Hickey for providing that rare literary camaraderie that only the most accomplished writers are able to conjure from language. Reading him, you’ll have the pleasure of discovering the beauty of art alongside a charming and inimitable companion. A cowboy Virgil leading pilgrims through hell with a drink in hand and cigarette cherry burning like a red eye into the heavy darkness.

At NPR’s Desert Companion, Dawn-Michelle Baude likes the book (hey, three for three!).

Well before the last chapter of Far from Respectable, it’s clear that Oppenheimer finds Hickey himself beautiful. The Texan who led a messy, break-the-mold life marked by drug addiction and kamikaze surfer moves, who personified boomer bohemia and survived to tell the tale, who never left his Austin roots behind although he climbed to the pinnacle of the ivory tower, is beautiful. And Hickey’s writing is beautiful because it keeps leading the reader deeper with its nimble allusions and astute connections. To write this review, I had to go from Oppenheimer’s Far from Respectable back to Hickey’s Air Guitar, and from there to Flaubert’s celebrated short story “A Simple Heart,” and from there to the Book of Job in the Old Testament. Instead of writing about Hickey’s notions of beauty, I found myself, with an assist from Nehamas, performing them and, as Hickey predicted, sharing them.

Still bladed, still relevant, still contentious, a beast: Dave Hickey. /  by Daniel Oppenheimer

Fascinating review of the book, by Odie Lindsey, in The Southwest Review. I won’t try to summarize, but here’s the very cool opening paragraph:

Daniel Oppenheimer’s Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art is definitive. You should read it, and you will enjoy it at a level that may depend upon your familiarity with the deified and demonized essayist, who you will either: a) know, and thus already be in dialog with Oppenheimer’s impressive work; or b) not know or know much, in which case you will be compelled to go and read Dave Hickey and maybe watch him on YouTube. The book delivers insightful, detailed overviews of Hickey’s biography—from boyhood in post-war Texas, to NYC gallerist, to premiere art critic and cultural provocateur—and his career highlights: written, lauded, vilified. Notable here are the included snatches of Hickey’s writing—from his books The Invisible Dragon and the canonical Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy—as well as an unflinching essay and interview Oppenheimer completed last year, with Hickey staring at life while half-enfeebled in New Mexico. Still bladed, still relevant, still contentious, a beast: Dave Hickey.

The Book He Didn't Write, Sebastien Boncy, and other things /  by Daniel Oppenheimer

Bookforum has a short excerpt from the book on its website. It’s about Pagan America, the book that Hickey tried and failed to write in 2000s and early 2010s.

For a number of years in the late 2000s and early 2010s, Dave Hickey’s byline in magazines said that he was working on a book called Pagan America. There’s even a ghostly record of the title on Google Books, with a precise page count and ISBN, as though the manuscript were finished, paginated, and catalogued, but then withdrawn and locked away in the writer’s desk, left to be published, if ever, posthumously.

For those of us who were Hickey fans during those years of uncertainty, it was a shimmering promise. After the cold brilliance of his first book, The Invisible Dragon, and the warm love song of his next, Air Guitar, he was going to bring it all together into one grand synthesis, a story of America that would elevate us and explain us to ourselves.

Also:

I had a great conversation about Hickey, politics, art, America, Foucault, etc. with Geoff Shullenberger on his podcast Outsider Theory.

Travis Diehl wrote a substantive, if luke-warm, review of my book for Art in America.

I loved writing this piece on Haiti-born, Houston-based photographer Sebastien Boncy. Totally fascinating dude, and wonderful photographer. An excerpt:

Seeing Houston clearly has been a project for photographer Sebastien Boncy since he arrived in the city from Haiti, in 1994, to attend the University of Houston. “My parents told me I could go to college in the States, but it had to be somewhere where we had family,” says Boncy. “That meant New York, Chicago, or Houston. New York was too expensive. Chicago was too cold. So I came to Houston.”

The American cities of his imagination, growing up in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Pétion-Ville, were landscapes familiar from TV and the movies. He thought of the gritty streets of New York and Chicago, or the sun-drenched beaches of Southern California. “I watched a lot of HBO,” he says. Houston was only in the picture because he had an uncle who lived there. “It’s not really on most Haitians’ itinerary.”

Beauty and the Blob /  by Daniel Oppenheimer

Really lovely essay from Blake Smith that also happens to be a review of the book:

Far From Respectable is a book about the political risks of, and political threats to, the pleasure of beauty—and Oppenheimer tenderly reveals his own pleasure in reading (and over the course of time, befriending) Hickey. As he recounts his subject’s life and contemporary relevance, Oppenheimer stages his own enjoyment of Hickey with such lucid warmth that he seems to substantiate Hickey’s insistence that our enjoyment of art entangles us in other human loves. The last pages of Far From Respectable, for example, present Oppenheimer and his wife together in bed, reading with rapture from the same page of Hickey. Oppenheimer thus pulls off what Hickey elsewhere calls “the most elegant rhetorical maneuver available to writers … to do in the doing what he describes in the writing,” to share in aesthetic pleasure simply by talking about sharing it. Far From Respectable succeeds in proving, through its reader’s own pleasure, the truth of Hickey’s vision of art as an experience that opens the self toward others. As he says of Hickey’s work, Oppenheimer could say of his own: It is “less an argument … than a series of literary efforts to conjure up … visions, only briefly realizable if at all, of life as we would like it to be and of art as it occasionally can be.”

In Texas Monthly and Washington Post /  by Daniel Oppenheimer

Texas Monthly just posted a long feature I did on Dave Hickey’s Austin gallery, A Clean Well-Lighted Place, which he ran from 1967-71. An excerpt:

The gallery’s first show was of paintings by Jim Franklin, a Galveston native who was doing comic illustrations for the underground Austin paper the Rag. The show didn’t sell much, but Hickey’s judgment was soon vindicated; a short time later Franklin debuted his armadillo drawings, which endure to this day as icons of countercultural Austin. Franklin also became known as one of the players in the national underground comix movement, along with other Texas artists such as Jack Jackson and Gilbert Shelton (both of whom also were featured at A Clean Well-Lighted Place).

“Dave was the best dealer you could have and the worst,” says Buxkamper, who began showing at the gallery after Hickey saw his BFA show. “He really championed your work. Got it into good exhibitions and major collections. He was the worst of dealers because of the money. He owes me money to this day. He’s not ashamed of it. It’s also why he was the best of dealers. He wasn’t selling commodities. It wasn’t a product he was marketing. It was a vision, a person. He would do whatever was necessary to gain attention for his artists. He once traded a painting of mine to a big collector in Fort Worth. In his mind, he was going to trade it, sell it, and split the money, but that didn’t happen. I was quite happy to have the recognition rather than the money.”

“I was bad at paying artists,” admits Hickey, unapologetically. “I still owe Peter Plagens. I still owe Stephen Mueller, although he’s dead. I owe Barry money. I fully intended to pay everybody, of course.”

I also have a review in the Washington Post of Bernadette Barton’s Pornification: How Raunch Culture Ruined America.

This is what “The Pornification of America” gets right. What it lacks is sufficient awe for, or even interest in, the power and allure of pornography and pornified imagery. Barton is not puritanical in a straightforward way. Two of her previous books are sympathetic engagements with the lives of sex workers, and the third is about the lives of gay men and women in Bible Belt America. She is pro-sex and against stigmatizing people’s sexual choices (unless they involve watching porn). But it’s dispiriting to read a whole book on porn and pornification with so little psychological curiosity about the experience of the men and women who use or model themselves on the stuff.

The result is a kind of thudding sameness. We get quotes from young women who seem to already share Barton’s perspective on raunch culture, lots of examples of pop culture’s sexual objectification of women, supporting passages from scholars who agree with Barton, and a faith in the good news of the anti-pornification gospel so staunch that by the end, it comes to seem willfully naive. To those of us who are in thrall, to one degree or another, to the power of porn and pornification, it has little to say beyond what we already know.

Blurbs and a Book Jacket /  by Daniel Oppenheimer

I don’t have the physical thing yet, but we’ve locked down the jacket design and my blurbs. So I wanted to share them, particularly the blurbs.

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Ben Moser, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Susan Sontag is wonderful and wonderfully readable, says this: “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.”

Steven Soderbergh, the amazing filmmaker, says this: “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.”

My debut in Texas Monthly /  by Daniel Oppenheimer

Publishing a longer piece in Texas Monthly has been a goal of mine since I moved to Austin 14 years ago. So it’s lovely to have this profile of conservative intellectual Gladden Pappin in the January issue. An excerpt:

In the aftermath of the election, Pappin has been puzzling through what path conservatism might take after Donald Trump’s presidency. The endeavor is part of Pappin’s major project of the past four years, ever since he first came onto the scene as one of the pseudonymous writers of the Journal of American Greatness, a pro-Trump blog that launched in early 2016. He’s been using the tools of political theory and history to parse the meaning of Trump and the deep political and cultural forces that brought him to power and continue to support him. He has been plotting out, and even trying to help write, the next chapter of the conservative movement. 

What he sees—in Trump’s 2016 victory, in the results of the 2020 election, and in more subterranean shifts in conservative politics—is the possibility of a new kind of Republican party. It is one that is economically populist, culturally conservative, multiracial, cautious about the use of military power, and, above all, comfortable with the exercise of state power. It’s a big-government conservatism in both the economic and cultural spheres, more generous with social benefits, more prudish about sex, and more Christian in atmospherics if not in explicit doctrine. “The base is already there,” says Pappin, who is working on a book on the future of the American right. “It’s broader even than what the Republicans can appeal to right now.”

Richie Neal and Alex Morse /  by Daniel Oppenheimer

Way back in December and January I was able to do a bunch of reporting on the upcoming Democratic congressional primary in Massachusetts’ 1st district, which includes my hometown of Springfield. After many moons the piece was published at the end of last month in the Ideas section of the Boston Globe. More than just a campaign piece, it’s a bit of a meditation on what kind of politics the long-suffering district needs right now and for the future.

The race is another front in the battle between the party’s left flank and its centrist establishment. It’s also a moment of reckoning for a region that has never recovered from the deindustrialization of the last few decades, one of the left-behind and wounded places in America that Trump’s campaign in 2016 brought to the foreground and promised to heal.

It’s not Trump country yet. It’s safely blue, and will elect a Democrat in November, but it has been trending red over the last few elections, and it poses a challenge that Democrats would be wise to heed, particularly in the face of the pandemic and the economic damage it’s causing. Is there a politics that will enable the small towns and cities of western Massachusetts not just to regroup on the other side of disease and recession, but to be revitalized?

The Decline of the West /  by Daniel Oppenheimer

I reviewed Ross Douthat’s book The Decadent Society for the Washington Post. Excerpt:

We are, argues Douthat, living through a period of profound exhaustion in the cultural, political and economic life of the modern West. We’re inventing less, having fewer kids, recycling old culture instead of creating new stuff, getting stuck in mostly dead political vernaculars and narcotizing ourselves with drugs, porn, tweets and superhero movies. And we’re not an exception. Douthat’s bet is that the rising nations of the east and south are likely to follow. We’re running out of steam, everywhere and along multiple axes. Following the late social critic Jacques Barzun, Douthat calls this state of civilizational low energy “decadence.”

“Decadence,” he writes, “refers to economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development. It describes a situation in which repetition is more the norm than innovation; in which sclerosis afflicts public institutions and private enterprises alike; in which intellectual life seems to go in circles; in which new developments in science, new exploratory projects, underdeliver compared with what people recently expected. And, crucially, the stagnation and decay are often a direct consequence of previous development. The decadent society is, by definition, a victim of its own significant success.”

We have fancy phones but no flying cars, fancy phones but no colony on Mars, and Siri and Alexa (i.e. fancy phones) but no HAL 9000 or Lieutenant Commander Data. We play at socialism and fascism on Twitter, but the great ideologies of the modern era, including liberalism, are spent, and nothing new seems to be coalescing to take their place. God is dead. Rock-and-roll is dead. The novel is dead. A reanimated Frank Sinatra is touring with hologram Tupac. A reality TV star is our president.

Dave Hickey essay in The Point /  by Daniel Oppenheimer

As you know (who am I kidding? you don’t know - there isn’t even a “you” to address on this infrequently visited website) I’m working on a book about the great art and culture critic Dave Hickey. As part of that project, I just published a long essay in The Point about my visit to see Dave in Santa Fe. An excerpt:

He treated you like you were supposed to get out there and do something,” Hickey once wrote of his old theater professor Walther Volbach, who’d landed at Texas Christian University after fleeing the Nazis. “He told me I was a callow redneck with all the spirituality of a toilet-seat—that I could possibly cure the former but would probably have to live with the latter—but that was great! Nobody had ever told me I was anything before, so I took it to heart.”

Dave on the page is a gentler presence than Herr Volbach, but he’d done for me, as a young would-be writer, something like what Volbach did for him. He’d deflated me, and liberated me. Nobody cared whether I dedicated myself to writing. It was a selfish, superfluous thing to do, and one that deserved no presumption of virtue. If done right, however, it could be wonderful and world-shaking. Dave also revealed to me who the real enemies of such an endeavor were. They were the “Aryan muscle-boys” who would bend art to serve their stern, humorless deities.

Moderating at the Texas Book Festival /  by Daniel Oppenheimer

The past four years, more or less, I’ve had the opportunity to moderate panels in the CSPAN2/Book TV tent at the Texas Book Festival. The nice thing about this, aside from just the fun of moderating, is that I get to be on TV.

This year I moderated a panel with Tom LoBianco, author of a new biography of Mike Pence, and Anne Nelson, author of a new book on the Council for National Policy, a shadowy group of hard right funders and ideologues dedicated to turning the US into a lovely melange of plutocracy and theocracy. It was cool (the panel, not the shadowy network).

Self Portrait in Black and White | Sontag /  by Daniel Oppenheimer

Over at Tablet Magazine I review Thomas Chatterton Williams’s new book, Self Portrait in Black and White. It’s a lovely book, and one of the rare works, I think, that slices the cake of race in a fresh way. I write.

Losing My Cool was a provocative book, much blunter about the toxicity of certain aspects of contemporary young black masculinity than one typically gets from young black writers, but it left in place the conventional premise that being a proud, self-identified black person was the obvious goal for someone like Williams. Self-Portrait rejects the premise. It argues, in a way that could be banal but in fact is fascinating, that the whole project of defining people as black and white (and brown and red and yellow) is bankrupt, and that the extraordinary work that black people have done digging themselves out from under the mountain of slavery, segregation, and discrimination has opened up a small but slowly widening escape route to other kinds of existences. And they should take it.

Over at Kirkus Reviews I interview Benjamin Moser, the author of a new biography of Susan Sontag. I liked that book a lot too, and enjoyed talking to Moser. I particularly enjoyed this story, which is basically every nonfiction writer’s fantasy.

On February 25, 2012, Benjamin Moser got an email with the subject heading: REALLY BIG QUESTION. He opened it, and it was indeed a really big question. Susan Sontag’s son, along with her agent and publisher, wanted to know if Moser was interested in writing the authorized biography of the legendary intellectual, who died of leukemia in 2004.

Chuckles Krauthammer and Susie Linfield /  by Daniel Oppenheimer

Back in January I reviewed a posthumous collection from the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer.

I find Krauthammer frustrating, a smart man and expert craftsman who lacked the intellectual grit to push at, or through, his own defenses and premises. He was forgiving of the flaws of ideological allies but too often dismissive of the intellects and motives of the people with whom he disagreed. He was a close and thoughtful reader within a narrow field but indifferent to the point of ignorance when it came to many of the major intellectual figures and movements of the modern era. He practiced as a psychiatrist for seven years before becoming a full-time writer, but he wasn’t interested in the nuances of human psychology. He was a facile writer of sentences, an excellent summarizer of ideas and a master architect of the op-ed, which is a notoriously difficult form.

But he was a complacent thinker. Krauthammer stopped at the point when things threatened to become too complex or messy. Even his contempt for Donald Trump, which he was admirably willing to bear with him into the lion’s den (i.e. Fox News), ran up against hard limits. Trump, for Krauthammer, wasn’t symptomatic of deeper flaws in our country or the conservative movement. He was an aberration.


For Kirkus Reviews I interviewed NYU prof Susie Linfield about her new book, Into The Lion’s Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky. It’s a much better book than the Krauthammer. Someone should excerpt, in particular, her pages on Noam Chomsky’s delusions about Israel and Palestine. It’s fascinating. I write:

If there’s a villain in the book, it is Noam Chomsky. Linfield gives Chomsky his due; in the early years of his writing on the conflict, she writes, he wasprescient in many ways. After about 1980, however, she sees him descending into a flight of wishful thinking from which he has yet to emerge. The forensic analysis that Linfield conducts of this descent is devastating. 

Review: Wesley Yang's The Souls of Yellow Folk /  by Daniel Oppenheimer

I review Wesley Yang’s The Souls of Yellow Folk for Quillette. An excerpt:

Collectively, the essays paint a fascinating and disturbing picture of pre-dystopian anomie and dissolution. The lonely and angry and oversensitive young men who will, by 2035 or so, have coalesced into roving tribes of bandits and revolutionaries, are—at the moment—only coalescing and pillaging online. They’re self-identifying and tribalizing as masters of seduction rather than masters of destruction. They’re killing themselves, not others, or killing as loners rather than as bands of brownshirts.

Untitled Book on Dave Hickey /  by Daniel Oppenheimer

In October of this year (2018), I signed a contract with The University of Texas Press to write a short book on the writer and critic Dave Hickey.

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I’m a huge admirer of Hickey, and although he has gotten a fair amount of attention, at least within certain circles, there’s still work to do on him. Thus the book. The plan is to release it in 2020.

Here’s a few paragraphs from my proposal, to give you a sense of it:

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Twenty-one years ago, Art Issues Press released Dave Hickey’s Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy. At the time Hickey, a former editor of Art in America, was well known in the art world but almost entirely unknown outside it. An earlier book of criticism, The Invisible Dragon, had been a cult hit, and over the decades he’d run with a lot of genuinely famous people—Waylon, Andy, Keith, Dennis—but he wasn’t famous himself. There was no reason to believe that this second small book of criticism would change anything about that. In the two decades since, thanks in large part to Air Guitar, he’s won the MacArthur “Genius” Prize, been feted from New York to Vegas to LA, and amassed the kind of passionate adoration, and fierce hatred, that no critic has seen since Susan Sontag dropped Against Interpretation. Both The Invisible Dragon and Air Guitar give off such a charismatic charge that they're still, all these years and printings later, pressed from hand to hand as though the giver is passing along some kind of secret lore. He’s been painted and sung about. He’s written songs, curated shows, and owned art galleries. He’s done most of the drugs that were around in the 20th century. And he’s influenced generations of artists, art critics, musicians, and writers. He’s as loved and loathed by the hipsters at N+1 and The Baffler as he is by the tenured faculty at the Art Institute and the senior editors at Artforum.

At the heart of the Hickey legend are, really, two Hickeys. One is the writer. This Hickey is capable of extraordinary subtlety and vulnerability. He has been a champion of gays, women and other underdogs in the art world, and a dedicated enemy of the “Aryan muscleboys” who would keep them down and out. He masterfully applies haute French theory to the grittiest realms of pop culture, illuminating high and low in the process. He writes catalog essays that pass the most severe academic muster, and personal essays that are among the most beautiful things that have been written, period, in the last few decades. Hickey the writer has exerted a seminal influence not just on art writing but on American art itself, academic aesthetic philosophy, and the general practice of nonfiction writing in America.

Then there’s the other Dave Hickey. The persona. This Hickey can be a crusty, wrinkled old white asshole who likes to say obnoxious things just to get a rise out of those who are easily provoked. The persona has cost him jobs and fellowships, needlessly alienated young artists and writers who might otherwise find his work liberating, and blinded him to currents and relationships in the art world that he himself might find liberating.

It’s both Hickeys that have built, in concert and tension, the legend. In the long run it is the writing that should remain, with the persona informing but never obscuring our understanding and appreciation of the writing.

This book will be the first substantive effort to take on Hickey the writer and thinker. It will explore--stylishly, intellectually, and essayistically--who he is, what he has been saying, what's special about how he's saying what he's saying, and why the world would be better off if more people read and understood his work.