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.