Dave Hickey

Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty by critic Dave Hickey…Quotes from the Reading…

            “… There are issues worth advancing in images that are worth admiring-that the truth is never plain nor appearances sincere.  To try to make them so is to neutralize the primary, gorgeous eccentricity of imagery in the Western culture since the Reformation:  the fact that it cannot be trusted, that images are always presumed to be proposing something contestable and controversial.” (Page 8)

            “The task of beauty is to enfranchise the audience and acknowledge its power-to designate a territory of shared values between the image and its beholder and then, in this territory, to advance an argument by valorizing the picture’s problematic content.” (Page 9)

            “… Contemporary art-no longer required to recommend images to our attention or to insinuate them into vernacular memory, no longer even to try.  The route from the image to the beholder now detours through an alternative institution, ostensibly distinct from church and state.” (Page 12-13)

Here of some examples of photographs done by Robert Mapplethorpe, the artist that Dave Hickey used as an example to support his critique:

Mia Powers