Famous Quotes & Sayings

Dave Hickey Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 30 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Dave Hickey.

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Google+ Pinterest Share on Linkedin

Famous Quotes By Dave Hickey

Dave Hickey Quotes 726716

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

Dave Hickey Quotes 426572

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

Dave Hickey Quotes 968281

Martha Stewart contributes more to our civility than the Baptist church. — Dave Hickey

Dave Hickey Quotes 207126

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. — Dave Hickey

Dave Hickey Quotes 1876336

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. — Dave Hickey

Dave Hickey Quotes 1513564

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

Dave Hickey Quotes 1767182

I cannot tell you how many quiet mornings I have spent sitting around hotel rooms and furnished apartments in the United States and Mexico, smoking cigarettes, plunking the guitar, and watching Perry Mason
telling myself, Well, at least I don't have a day job. And there is nothing wrong with that. I am not guilty of anything. Perry would see that in a minute. — Dave Hickey

Dave Hickey Quotes 987990

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

Dave Hickey Quotes 1318819

Out of sheer perversity, I followed beauty where it lead, into the silence. — Dave Hickey

Dave Hickey Quotes 1266142

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

Dave Hickey Quotes 1369844

Gossip is the currency of the discourse, so you should shut up about yourself. Never confess, never explain, never apologize, and never complain. — Dave Hickey

Dave Hickey Quotes 1379559

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

Dave Hickey Quotes 1462946

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

Dave Hickey Quotes 1541450

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

Dave Hickey Quotes 1559167

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

Dave Hickey Quotes 2047229

I'm retiring because my time is up. — Dave Hickey

Dave Hickey Quotes 2106860

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

Dave Hickey Quotes 2177510

I think that if you don't like something and it's not easy, you shouldn't be doing it. — Dave Hickey

Dave Hickey Quotes 1304501

Beauty is and always will be blue skies and open highway. — Dave Hickey

Dave Hickey Quotes 1279854

There are issues worth advancing in images worth admiring; and the truth is never "plain," nor appearances ever "sincere." To try to make them so is to neutralize the primary, gorgeous eccentricity of imagery in Western culture since the Reformation: the fact that it cannot be trusted, that imagery is always presumed to be proposing something contestable and controversial. This is the sheer, ebullient, slithering, dangerous fun of it. No image is presumed inviolable in our dance hall of visual politics, and all images are potentially powerful. — Dave Hickey

Dave Hickey Quotes 113867

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

Dave Hickey Quotes 1216512

If there is no art, no culture, then what the fuck are we going to talk about? These are our stories and our stories are all we got! — Dave Hickey

Dave Hickey Quotes 1139339

Art editors and critics - people like me - have become a courtier class. — Dave Hickey

Dave Hickey Quotes 1063777

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

Dave Hickey Quotes 993462

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

Dave Hickey Quotes 787977

Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else's privilege. — Dave Hickey

Dave Hickey Quotes 551151

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. — Dave Hickey

Dave Hickey Quotes 503452

As my friend Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe has argued persuasively, there is an element of positivity in the visible world, and in color particularly, that totally eludes the historicity of language, with its protocols of absence and polarity. The color red, as an attribute of the world, is always there. It is something other than the absence of yellow and blue
and, thus, when that red becomes less red, it becomes more one or the other. It never exists in a linguistic condition of degradation or excess that must necessarily derive from our expectations. — Dave Hickey

Dave Hickey Quotes 407967

I hate all that woozy political and psychotherapeutic crap applied to books and art. — Dave Hickey

Dave Hickey Quotes 151315

Beautiful art sells. If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells anything else, it is a seductive advertisement. — Dave Hickey