Wasted Words: The Essential Dave Hickey Online Compilation

by Dave Hickey, Julia Friedman (Editor)

Between June 2014 and April 2015, Dave Hickey posted almost 3,000 digital comments on social media, prompting nearly 700,000 words in response from art lovers, acolytes, and skeptics. Wasted Words is an unedited comprehensive transcript of these exchanges. This polyphonic digital discourse reveals the range of Hickey’s strong opinions, as he embarks on a crypto-enlightenment project for the benefit of "dunces" and "pricks."

Dave Hickey’s digital writings highlight the impact of digital technology on culture while allowing a more intimate glimpse of the author. These writings reveal the well-known critic in a creative-informal, rather than critical-formal, mode. Not only do they flesh out many of the ideas elucidated in Hickey’s essays on art, but they also cover a variety of topics, including the year 1972, Texas Eagle Scouts, and Hickey's own academic misadventures.

This publication was conceived and produced by LG Williams and The Estate of LG Williams™.

# # # # # Dave Hickey is a distinguished American art and cultural critic and the author of The Invisible Four Essays on Beauty (1993), Air Essays on Art and Democracy (1997), and Pirates and Farmers (2014). His most recent book, 25 Essays on Their Art , is just out from the University of Chicago Press. Hickey was a Professor of English at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, and a Distinguished Professor of Criticism for the MFA Program in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of New Mexico. LG Williams is a Los Angeles-based artist and recently the Endowed University Instructor at The Academy of Art University; Robert Hughes Distinguished Visual Artist-In-Residence at The Lodge in Hollywood, CA; and the Emmy Hennings Distinguished Professor at D(D).DDDD University. LG has exhibited in various national and international venues, including The Internet Pavilion of La Biennale Di Venezia , and has appeared in Artforum , The New York Times , Times Literary Supplement , The Guardian , Japan Times , Los Angeles Times , La Stampa , Bookforum , Purple Diary , Mousse Magazine , The Brooklyn Rail among others. Julia Friedman is a Russian-born art historian, writer, and curator. PCP Press is an independent publisher of avant-garde books and insurgent authors. Founded in 1990 in San Francisco at a time when transgressive and sometimes esoteric international art books had a difficult time making their way into the wider American marketplace, over the past three decades PCP has grown into a consistent publisher of books, special editions and rare publications from an array of the world’s most respected authors and cultural institutions — including Raymond Pettibon, Dave Hickey, Wayne Thiebaud, Bryan Reynolds, David Hawkes, Shepard Fairey, LG Williams, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, and Luscerne Kunstpanorama. # # # # #

581 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2016

About the author

David Hickey (born circa 1939) is an American art and cultural critic. He has written for many American publications including Rolling Stone, Art News, Art in America, Artforum, Harper's Magazine, and Vanity Fair. He is currently Professor of English at the University of Nevada Las Vegas and Distinguished Professor of Criticism for the MFA Program in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of New Mexico.

Known for his arguments against academicism and in favor of the effects of rough-and-tumble free markets on art, his critical essays have been published in two volumes: The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1993) and Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997). In 2009, Hickey published a revised and updated version of The Invisible Dragon, adding an introduction that addressed changes in the art world since the book's original publication, as well as a new concluding essay. He has been the subject of profiles in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, U.S. News and World Report, Texas Monthly, and elsewhere. He was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called "genius grant."

Hickey graduated from Texas Christian University in 1961 and received his PhD from the University of Texas two years later. In 1989, SMU Press published Prior Convictions, a volume of his short fiction. He was owner-director of A Clean Well-Lighted Place, an art gallery in Austin, Texas and director of Reese Palley Gallery in New York. He has served as Executive Editor for Art in America magazine, as contributing editor to The Village Voice, as Staff Songwriter for Glaser Publications in Nashville and as Arts Editor for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

In 1994, he received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism from the College Art Association.[1] In 2003, he was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame, sponsored by the Friends of the University of Nevada, Reno Libraries.