|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon (Foundation for Advanced Critical Studies, 1993) Reissued in paperback by Distributed Art Publishers, 1994. Few writers have the nerve to take on a theme as airy and as sprawling as "beauty," or the acumen to grant it coherence. But Dave Hickey does just that in this collection of four essays that take a look at what constitutes our notions of beauty, and how modern art can guide these notions into an ever-broadening arc. The essays are light and meandering, but their scope is enormous. Within the slender volume's 64 pages, Hickey muses on everything from Warhol's challenges to the definition of art, to Foucault's deft expansions on perception. On another axis, he plots the beauty in Robert Mapplethorpe's ugliness and the ugliness in Caravaggio's beauty. The conversational exploration in The Invisible Dragon does not bolster any elaborate theories on the artwork it glides over. Hickey simply takes the lid off of a jar of mind-candies and invites us to reach right in. He shows how the disparate spheres of modern art can overlap in unexpected ways, and makes us think twice about our aesthetic convictions. MORE: Link to the Publishers Weekly Review A Bio of David Hickey |
|
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||