Lecture: Dave Hickey "The Age of the Art Fair"

Dave Hickey, recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” award, and internationally acclaimed art critic gave this lecture on February 22, 2007, entitled “The Age of the Art Fair.”

[@irmalybrackin4048]

The Boone-docks of North Carollina has the best eye candy. Mr. Hickey is mistaken. . It is a new Era when the art fair artist become regional.

[@pkpapers]

25:20 - Poser and closer (Castelli and Karp). 59:14 - Protestant ethos.

[@kellyanquoe]

excellent. non-profits have no say in the value of art. art gives us what the culture takes away. tachnoloyg lags behing culture. we don't like pictures. half the art world is people who hate it. dear humans who value art above all....you are a historically tiny minority. relish it. loov darlings

[@duncanweller1]

Hickey is quite correct: contemporary art is about fashion, changing whenever the rich get bored of their collection and need a new status uplift to be taken seriously by others in their "class." The art fairs are their IKEAS. The contemporary artists are always in waiting, praying that their art will be chosen next, for the next fashionable movement. They, and the public, are not in control. MEANWHILE, the popular arts build and build on top of the shoulders of giants producing better and better work by more and more talented people, to the point where very few of us care what the latest fashion statement is as chosen by the rich and status mongers. If you look for the social functions of art - 4 major divisions, with multiple subdivisions, (by going back to history books written before 1970) and by simply keeping your eyes open and thinking furiously, you discover that the art used and celebrated worldwide by every culture throughout time employ these perennial functions. Contemporary art has so inverted these functions that people in the contemporary art world operate divorced from everything that art was, is and does for the vast majority of us. The primary function of contemporary art is to allow people who have no talent to pretend that they are artists. They are not part of an art movement, but of an egalitarian movement, but one controlled by the powerful. The promotion of the idea that everyone can be an artist never was a historical function of art. Everyone can learn to paint and be creative, but not everyone can be a great artist. There are distinct differences with a few exceptions. Contemporary art also allows governments to fund an art form that will never challenge them. The subjective nature of contemporary art limits artists' ability to be critical. Again there are a few exceptions, but the benefits of the subjective realm of contemporary art push artists and their funders to enjoy a kind of nihilistic silence when it comes to the social and political world (contemporary American artists skipping gleefully off to China to support a regime accused of genocide for example), let alone function to beautify the world around us. Anyway, I could go on and on, but Dave Hickey, doesn't know art. He intentionally supports the status quo that helps to blind the public. He's a shill for the world of pseudo-art. He's a pawnbroker of just another nonsense ideology (like evangelicalism) powerfully pushing the public's head into the sand, like the policies put forth by a cold-hearted political party when in power. I wish these universities would have speakers talking about the value of the popular arts or better yet - the Perennial Arts - those arts that really work with our human commonalities to bring out a better understanding of who we are as human beings and do so with great intellectual thought and output, but in a way that is entertaining and deeply meaningful.

[@andygiannakakis5444]

RIp

[@tucciproducer]

Yay! I'm the 10,000 view!

[@tucciproducer]

Wow, he is ducking cynical!