26+ Dave Hickey Quotes On Education, And Management And Farmers

Dave Hickey is an American art critic and author. He is known for his writings on the intersection of art and culture, and his advocacy of beauty as an essential element of art. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and has written several books, including The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Dave Hickey on leadership, life, education.

Top 10 Dave Hickey Quotes

1. Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else's privilege.
2. Beauty is and always will be blue skies and open highway.
3. Out of sheer perversity, I followed beauty where it lead, into the silence.
4. Beautiful art sells. If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells anything else, it is a seductive advertisement.
5. Even if one succeeds in making a silk purse out of a sow's ear, there remains the problem of what to do with a one-eared sow.
6. I have no evangelical feelings about art at all. I despise art education. Art doesn't lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It's a set of propositions about how things should look.
7. Gossip is the currency of the discourse, so you should shut up about yourself. Never confess, never explain, never apologize, and never complain.
8. Art editors and critics - people like me - have become a courtier class.
9. Where do you learn how to act? Not at church. America is a lot more like pagan Rome than we think. We still sacrifice to objects to gain our social goals.
10. I'm retiring because my time is up.

Dave Hickey Short Quotes

• I think that if you don't like something and it's not easy, you shouldn't be doing it.
• I hate all that woozy political and psychotherapeutic crap applied to books and art.
• Martha Stewart contributes more to our civility than the Baptist Church.

Dave Hickey Famous Quotes And Sayings

In my experience, you always think you know what you're doing; you always think you can explain, but you always discover, years later, that you didn't and you couldn't. This leads me to suspect that the principal function of human reason is to rationalize what your lizard brain demands of you. That's my idea. — Dave Hickey

Art and writing come from somewhere down around the lizard brain. It's a much more peculiar activity than we like to think it is. The problems arise when we try to domesticate the practice, to pretend that it's a normal human activity and that "everybody's creative." They're not. — Dave Hickey

Choosing beauty over content (or choosing beauty as content) is always an act of sedition. If we accept the cant of official culture, we must believe that the beauty we steal from any man-made thing is stolen from its more virtuous and metaphysical backstory, wherein "real" beauty is said to reside. — Dave Hickey

In images,... beauty was the agency that caused visual pleasure in the beholder; and any theory of images that was not grounded in the pleasure of the beholder begged the question of their efficacy and doomed itself to inconsequence. — Dave Hickey

With the artists, I don't teach, I coach. I can't tell them how to make art. I tell them to make more art. I tell them to get up early and stay up late. I tell them not to quit. I tell them if somebody else is already making their work. My job is to be current with the discourse and not be an asshole. That's all I wanted in a professor. — Dave Hickey

Most famous artists are created by their work and the idea of them as a character, and if they're smart and ambitious, they reinforce that character because they want to win. They want their views to prevail. — Dave Hickey

When you really respect somebody who does something different from you, your respect is for the quality of the job. — Dave Hickey

My mother was an economics professor. I'm proficient in math, and statistics, game theory, symbolic logic and all of that. — Dave Hickey

If I go to London, everyone wants to talk about Damien Hirst. I'm just not interested in him. Never have been. — Dave Hickey

I don't think the government should touch art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage risk-averse personalities to be artists. — Dave Hickey

The idea of political content is irrelevant. Content is irrelevant. I always tell my students, "Never forget you're writing words! You know, word one, word two, word three, word four. The words have to be organized. Nothing else does." — Dave Hickey

Art has political consequences, which is to say, it reorganizes society and creates constituencies of people around it. — Dave Hickey

It used to be that if you stood in front of a painting you didn't understand, you'd have some obligation to guess. Now you don't. — Dave Hickey

Life Lessons by Dave Hickey

1. Dave Hickey emphasizes the importance of looking at art with an open mind and an appreciation for beauty, rather than judging it based on preconceived notions.
2. He also encourages viewers to take a more active role in the appreciation of art, rather than relying on the opinions of experts.
3. Finally, Hickey encourages viewers to be critical of the art they encounter, and to consider the context in which it was created.