NEW YORK, NY.- Dave Hickey, who at various points in his life owned an art gallery in Texas, hung out with Andy Warhol in New York, wrote country music in Nashville, Tennessee, and, finally, settled into a career as one of the country’s leading and most divisive art critics, died Nov. 12 at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was 82.

His wife, art historian Libby Lumpkin, said the cause was heart disease.

Drawing on his decades of disparate and often debauched living, Hickey’s criticism was at once erudite and quotidian. He dashed from Derrida to Liberace, zone defense to Cezanne, rejecting any distinction between high and low culture and insisting on the extreme subjectivity of aesthetic standards.

“There’s no difference between the highest art and the lowest art except for the audience it appeals to,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 2002. “Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else’s privilege.”

Hickey, who taught criticism at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, burst onto the art-world scene in 1993 with the publication of “The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty.” The book did many things, but chief among them was to declare that “the issue of the ’90s will be beauty” — a claim that fell like a hydrogen bomb amid the raging culture wars, in which terms like “beauty” had been cast aside as racist, sexist and elitist.

A chain-smoking white man given to all-black clothing ensembles and name-dropping artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Ed Ruscha, Hickey seemed typecast for the part of the retrograde renegade. His offhand, frequently off-color jokes — “I like the art world. There are a lot of gay people and attractive women with low-cut dresses,” he told Texas Monthly in 2009 — appeared to reinforce the point.

But his writing eluded easy pigeonholing. Beauty, he argued, was not an innate quality, but an aspect of how people responded to a work of art, and an avenue toward understanding its meaning. It was subjective and quicksilver, and it created the give-and-take that in turn generated the cultural consensus necessary in a democratic society.

“The Invisible Dragon” and a subsequent book, “Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy” (1997), established Hickey as one of the most interesting and sought-after critics of his generation. He lectured widely, wrote dozens of exhibition catalogs and organized several gallery shows.

He won the Frank Jewett Mather Award, the country’s highest honor for art criticism, in 1994, and in 2001 he received a “genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation. Ever the rebel, he later said he used the grant money to learn to play Texas Hold ’em poker in Las Vegas.

“Art is not good for you,” he told The Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2001. “It’s not necessarily therapeutic. It’s supposed to be exciting. It’s not penicillin. It’s more like cocaine. It’s a drug. It gets you excited and makes you want more.”

David Charles Hickey was born Dec. 5, 1938, in Fort Worth, Texas. He and his family moved frequently — his father, David Cecil Hickey, worked for a string of auto distribution centers while eking out a career as a jazz musician.

Young David was especially influenced by a year spent in Southern California, where he learned to surf and where his father often brought him along to practice sessions. The experience left him with a lifelong love of jazz; he later said he learned to write by listening to the “long, lapidary lines” of Chet Baker.

His father’s California sojourn failed, and a few years after returning to Fort Worth, Hickey took his own life. David’s mother, Helen (Balch) Hickey, who worked in her family’s flower shop and at nearby Texas Christian University, sent him to live with his grandparents.




He enrolled at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, majoring in engineering and math, but later transferred to Texas Christian, where he graduated with a degree in English in 1961. He later pursued a Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of Texas, focusing on French post-structuralist theory, but left in 1967 before completing his dissertation.

Instead, he and his wife, Mary Jane (Taylor) Hickey, borrowed $10,000 to open an art gallery in Austin, which they called A Clean Well-Lighted Place, after the short story by Ernest Hemingway.

Though the gallery lasted only two years, the experience gave Hickey a perspective on art as an object of commerce, its value determined by competing notions of beauty — an approach that would guide his later views as a critic.

The Hickeys moved to New York, where Hickey briefly ran the Reese Palley Gallery in SoHo; he quit after his boss insisted on showing work by Yoko Ono, an artist he despised. A few years as the executive editor of Art in America introduced him to journalism, and after he stepped down from that job, he spent several years writing freelance articles for outlets such as the Village Voice, Rolling Stone and Harper’s.

It was the era of New Journalism, dominated by big, brash personalities like Hunter S. Thompson and Lester Bangs, two writers Hickey counted as close friends. He mixed business and pleasure, partying with musicians including Aerosmith and Waylon Jennings and building relationships with Warhol, Ruscha and other artists.

His rock 'n' roll lifestyle, with a side helping of sex and drugs, soon broke up his marriage. He moved to Nashville, where he wrote songs for a music publisher and on the side for Marshall Chapman, whom he also dated and for whom, on tour, he sometimes played rhythm guitar.

Eventually, the strain of hard living ground him down, and in 1978 he returned to Fort Worth, where he lived with his mother and tried to get clean. He became the arts editor for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram and began to build a reputation as a serious voice in art criticism. In 1992 he moved to Las Vegas, and to academia.

Hickey took quickly to teaching, and to his new hometown. The city seemed to embody everything he dreamed of for a democratic culture — art galleries nestled beside giant casino-hotels, opera singers trading stages with lion tamers, and all of it filtered through the hustle and bustle of commerce.

“Las Vegas is a risk-oriented culture,” he told The New York Times in 2002. “If you’re not taking any chances, you’re not having any fun.”

He married Lumpkin in 1993. She taught alongside her husband at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, for several years, and in 2010 they moved to the University of New Mexico and settled in Santa Fe.

Along with his wife, he is survived by his brother, Michael Hickey.

Facing health problems, Hickey retired from teaching in 2012. But he kept writing, including on Facebook. Two edited collections of his posts, “Wasted Words” and “Dust Bunnies,” appeared in 2016. Another book, “25 Women: Essays on Their Art,” also published in 2016, raised the eyebrows of those who still viewed him as an unreconstructed male chauvinist.

And he continued to poke back at all the forces and institutions that he insisted had ruined the art world he had known as a younger man. He held identity politics in particular disdain, he told The Los Angeles Times in 2014, for dividing otherwise like-minded people into antagonistic categories.

“Identity politics tribalized the art underground and broke up the dissonant tone of it — a tribe of women, a tribe of Black people, a tribe of gay people,” he said. “It used to be all of us, together, just down in the dirt.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.