All revolutions are aesthetic…
Taste is power, and power is politics…
So taste has enormous power to shape history.

If it makes your scalp tingle, it’s art.

“Bad taste is real taste,
and good taste is just the residue
of someone else’s privilege.”

Jazz exemplifies the possibly doomed experiment
of being totally free, with others.

“If you’re on social media,
you are not making good art or, at least,
not enough of it…”

Just let beauty land.
We feel first.
All stabs at technical perfection
are stupid.

When you just miss the target,
you usually end up somewhere closer
to the truth.
Art is fundamentally social.
It draws us out of our silos
to stand in front of it and
talk.

Ultimately we all must improvise
a solution, as the shot-clock runs down.
The noblest thing, maybe,
is just showing up.
The missing are presumed
dead.

All people are either
pirates or farmers.
Farmers build fences and control territory;
pirates tear down fences and cross borders.
All artists are supposed to be
pirates.

-in memory of Dave Hickey
(December 5, 1938 – November 12, 2021)

Dave Hickey was an American art critic who wrote for many American publications including Rolling Stone, ARTnews, Art in America, Artforum, Harper’s Magazine, and Vanity Fair. He was nicknamed “The Bad Boy of Art Criticism” and “The Enfant Terrible of Art Criticism”. He had been 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.  – wikipedia

For an engaging obituary of Dave Hickey CLICK HERE.