Feint of Heart: Art Writings

📖 The Scoop

“Dave Hickey’s writing is an atomic bomb of wild styling, brilliant insight, philosophical leaps of a visionary imagination, and astral projections of sixth-sense taste. A perfect combination of Billy the Kid, Waylon Jennings, and Oscar Wilde.” —Jerry Saltz

“As a writer, Dave is a deep stylist, one of the best in the language. He uses style to tell truths otherwise inaccessible. You can’t separate his meaning from the timbre of his prose, whose repertoire includes plain American (which dogs and cats can understand, as Marianne Moore noted), philosophical precision, polemical scorched earth, and defrocked scholarly mandarin. His arguments are places of the heart: bright pastures or dark alleys where you are accompanied by a voice explaining things you suddenly feel you always knew.” —Peter Schjeldahl

“Feint of Heart, what a substantial necessary collection. It’s too big to slip inside the breast pocket of your jacket, where it could deflect a bullet and save your life, if art sustains you the way it did Dave Hickey. But locate it there anyway, right next to your heart where it should be. This thorough and generous book is a glory.”
—Meeka Walsh, editor of Border Crossings and author of Malleable Forms: Selected Essays

"Dave Hickey is your friend. A really smart friend who sees everything for what it is, knows right from wrong, is kind and funny, and never looks down on people. If you are a writer, it’s okay to hate him just a little bit because, damn, those sentences."
—Paul Chaat Smith, author of Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong

From the legendary and iconoclastic critic Dave Hickey, a collection of twenty of his most emblematic essays on art

“We really don’t need to know the aesthetic and moral parameters of a work to love it—­only to know they are there.” —Dave Hickey

The late Dave Hickey was a singular voice on art, music, democracy, and culture. Known for his radical criticism, he united different worlds through a range of literary styles and techniques to ultimately explore what it means to be human. Complementing his iconic collections Air Guitar and The Invisible Dragon, Feint of Heart unites twenty of Hickey’s characteristically astute essays on art from over twenty years, most of which were originally published in exhibition catalogues that are long out of print. The result is a volume that shows the writer at his most creative and incisive in an ever-relevant exploration of beauty and value. Compiled and with an introduction by the writer and critic Jarrett Earnest, and featuring cover art by Ed Ruscha, this latest book is ideal for cult followers and new readers of Hickey, for artists and art critics, and for thinkers across all disciplines.

Including essays on Terry Allen, Karen Carson, Sarah Charlesworth, Vija Celmins, Vernon Fisher, Robert Gober, Ann Hamilton, Luis Jiménez, Hung Liu, Josiah McElheny, Elizabeth Peyton, Lari Pittman, David Reed, Bridget Riley, Norman Rockwell, Ed Ruscha, Steve Schapiro, Richard Serra, and Andy Warhol, as well as Hickey’s 2002 text “Buying the World,” which he later edited for inclusion in the revised edition of The Invisible Dragon.

Genre: Art / Criticism & Theory (fancy, right?)