His father, a jazz musician also named Dave, had committed suicide when he was a teenager. That nexus of word and sound was his recurrent passion.īy the end of the 1970s Hickey was living with his mother in Fort Worth. So what a country lyricist gives up in vocabulary, she gains by being more sensitive to the interplay between the sound and meaning of the language.
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“Most professional lyrics,” he said in a glowing review of Dolly Parton in 1974,Īre made from literary, written English while country lyrics are made from the language as it is spoken. Hook, Bobby Bare, and his then girlfriend Marshall Chapman, and helped to define the “outlaw” sensibility of his friends Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson with journalism that appeared regularly in Country Music magazine. Hickey then moved to Nashville, where he worked as a songwriter, composing lyrics for Dr. “Richard Tuttle or Keith Richards?” Music was more fun and the drugs were better. One day he went into an exhibition, saw pieces of white paper pasted on the gallery wall, and decided that rock and roll was where he belonged. In the early 1970s he moved to New York City, touring the outskirts of the Warhol scene and briefly serving as director of the Reese Palley Gallery, from which he was fired, followed by a short stint as editor of Art in America magazine, from which he was also fired. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway at the University of Texas, wrote his own fiction and a column in the Texas Observer, and started the first contemporary art gallery in Austin, called A Clean Well-Lighted Place. In the 1960s Hickey all but defended a Ph.D. What remains is the difficult task of taking stock of Hickey’s literary achievement. In Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art, Daniel Oppenheimer complicates the cartoon version of his life that continues to shadow his reputation as a writer. But alongside the bluster of “the bad boy of art criticism” was a neon Walter Pater of the Southwest who almost single-handedly remade the practice of art writing with his first two collections, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1993) and Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997). Thompson of the contemporary art world, ensconced as he was in Las Vegas at the height of his fame. The perfunctory obituaries that did appear treated him as a kind of Hunter S.
The magazines he’d published in since the 1960s hardly took notice. When Dave Hickey died last fall at the age of eighty-two, he left behind a singular contribution to the history of art writing, along with a badly bruised reputation, both routinely called “iconoclastic” for lack of anything more precise.