I HAD HAD this on the shelf for years and had read in it desultorily, but it took the news of his death to get me to actually go through it from beginning to end...and he really is as good as people always said.
And as distinctive. Hickey gets cited by fully-credentialed art historical sorts of people (e.g. Alexander Nehamas), even though he writes about subjects beyond the pale of traditional art history (customizing cars, Hank Williams, Perry Mason, Siegfried and Roy) in an aggressively personalized style much more reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson than of (say) Clement Greenberg, Leo Steinberg, or Michael Fried, to say nothing of Roger Fry. Or Walter Pater. (Although it's fun to imagine Pater and Hickey having a dinner in Art Critic Heaven.)
He takes mass culture as seriously as high culture--maybe more seriously, as he sometimes plainly states (e.g., in noting "my own predisposition to regard popular recorded music as the dominant art form of this American century"). He does not seem to take writing art criticism seriously at all, hence the book's title: "It [criticism] is the written equivalent of air guitar--flurries of silent, sympathetic gestures with nothing at their heart but the memory of the music."
Notwithstanding his penchant for popular culture and his unabashedly shoot-from-the-hip prose, Hickey was about as well-regarded a writer on art as anyone else in the U.S.A. So, I am wondering--why does literature not have anyone like this? Someone who, with literature as home base, could go this far afield, could leave so definitive a fingerprint on their prose, could as persuasively analyze the smudged groove of Watts, Wyman, & Richards, and then turn around and tell exactly what was going on in Pynchon, DeLillo, Ashbery, Notley, Robinson, etc.? The long-gone John Leonard had a bit of this quality, maybe...but it's hard to think of anyone extant who is even close.
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