Books by Dave Hickey
Andy Warhol: "Giant" Size, Large Format
by Editors of Phaidon Press, Steven Bluttal, Dave Hickey
There is perhaps no artist of the 20th century that is as famous and infamous as Andy Warhol.; Warhol Giant Size takes its inspiration from the over-the-top quality of Andy Warhol's life, career, and legacy and in a mammoth format and huge extent depicts, in roughly chronological order, the major events, people, works, and moments in the life of an artist who continues to be endlessly fascinating to those inside and outside of the art world.
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Andy Warhol "Giant" Size: mini format
by Dave Hickey, Phaidon Editors
The bestselling visual biography of one of the twentieth century's most innovative, influential artists
Andy Warhol "Giant" Size is the definitive document of this remarkable creative force, and a telling look at late twentieth-century pop culture. A must-have for Warhol fans and pop culture enthusiasts, this in-depth and comprehensive overview of Warhol's extraordinary career is packed with more than 2,000 illustrations culled from rarely seen archival material, documentary photography, and artwork.
Dave Hickey's compelling essay on Warhol's geek-to-guru evolution combines with chapter openers by Warhol friends and insiders to give special insight into the way the enigmatic artist led his life and made his art. It also provides a rare, behind-the-scenes look at the New York art world of the 1950s to the 1980s.
From the publisher of The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Volumes 1 - 5.
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The Book on Vegas
by Dave Hickey
In celebration of Las Vegas's centennial, Greybull Press has put together the ultimate visual tribute to sin city. An exceptional collection of images of the city as seen through the eyes of many of the most important photographers, artists and filmmakers of the past 50 years, it also includes classic archival images that capture the true essence of what makes Vegas the high/low pleasure capital of the world: its entertainers and celebrities, its winners and losers, the dealers, divas, players and dreamers. The Book on Vegas features landmark images of the desert city's architecture, street life, weddings, casinos and surrounding landscape. Some of the highlights include William Claxton's intimate backstage portraits of Marlene Dietrich, Sammy Davis Jr. and Noel Coward; Elliott Erwitt's iconic image of the lone slot machine player; Helmut Newton's photograph of the secret money room at Caesar's Palace; Bruce Weber's portfolio of Siegfried & Roy at home with their tigers; Grant Mudford's straight architectural photos of Liberace's outlandish estate; Lauren Greenfield and Philip-Lorca diCorcia's intimate portraits of pole dancers; Diane Keaton's mysterious images of hotel lobbies; Garry Winogrand's off-the-strip motel swimming pool; Ed Ruscha's stop-action shots of a typewriter being dropped from the window of a Buick speeding through the nearby desert; Leroy Neiman's painting of Buddy Hackett; stunning film stills from Casino, Koyaanasquatsi, Godfather II and other classic films--and much, much more. With over 300 pages, and 226 exquisitely produced color images, The Book on Vegas is luminous, loud and spectacular--like the city itself. Includes work by Doug Aitken, Guy Bourdin, Sophie Calle, Robert Crumb, Todd Eberle, William Eggleston, Eliott Erwitt, Larry Fink, Lee Friedlander, Ron Galella, Lauren Greenfield, Dennis Hopper, Mary Ellen Mark, Joel Meyerowitz, Richard Misrach, Helmut Newton, Martin Parr, Raymond Pettibon, Jack Pierson, Robert Polidori, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, Stephen Shore, Thomas Struth, Larry Sultan, Arne Svenson, Robert Venturi, Nick Waplington, Bruce Weber and others, as well as an essay by the influential art critic and University of Las Vegas professor Dave Hickey.
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Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds, 1953-2016: (Hugh Hefner Playboy Magazine Centerfold Collection, Nude Photography Book)
by Chronicle Books Staff, Dave Hickey, Hugh Hefner
With the first centerfold image of the radiant Marilyn Monroe, Hugh M. Hefner masterminded a cultural icon: Playboy's Playmate of the Month. This voluptuous new edition celebrates every nude centerfold from every issue of Playboy, from 1953 to February 2016. Initially published a decade ago, and now comprehensively updated, this must-have edition boasts 734 nude centerfolds and decade openers from literary luminaries, including an all-new essay by Elizabeth Wurtzel on the last decade of centerfolds, and a redesigned package that perfectly captures the complete cultural and aesthetic arc of the Playboy centerfold.
With contributions by:
- Robert Coover
- Paul Theroux
- Robert Stone
- Jay McInerney
- Daphne Merkin
- Maureen Gibbon
- Elizabeth Wurtzel
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The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty and Other Matters: 30th Anniversary Edition
by Dave Hickey
"If this book of shocking intelligence and moral hope is read widely and above all well, word for word, it will help the ―Peter Schjeldahl
An expanded edition of Hickey's controversial and exquisitely written apologia for beauty―championed by artists, reviled by art critics—is as powerful as ever 30 years on.
This special cloth and foil-stamped edition brings back into print The Invisible Dragon's four essays on beauty. It commingles them with five previously uncollected essays by the MacArthur Foundation "genius." Among the supplementary essays is Hickey's surprising early profile of Dolly Parton; his elegiac tribute to comedian Richard Pryor; a description of the literary innovation of John Rechy's seminal gay novel Numbers; and a personal essay on the art of writing. Hickey's singular analysis of paintings by Ed Ruscha enjoins us to listen to art, not just look at it. His coupling of Caravaggio's 1601 Incredulity of St. Thomas and Robert Mapplethorpe's 1978 photograph Lou, NYC still has the ability to shock. Hickey's interpretations of art by Bellini, Velázquez, Raphael, and others provide urgent lessons for contemporary art and gender politics. An afterword by Hickey's friend and Dragon's editor "queers" the brash, heterosexual gambler. It situates the creation of Dragon squarely within the traumatic time of the AIDS plague. The book originally made beauty visible under the looming presence of death and bodily decay. Today, Hickey's prescient diagnosis of the "therapeutic institution" resonates loudly. Artists respond by harnessing beauty as a source of meaning and of joy.
Dave Hickey (1938-2021) was one of the preeminent arts and cultural writers of modern times. He opened A Clean, Well-Lighted Place gallery in Austin, Texas, in the 1960s, before becoming executive editor at Art in America magazine. In the 1970s, he was a songwriter in Nashville, Tennessee, where he was instrumental in creating Outlaw country music. After the publication of The Invisible Dragon, Hickey became known as the "beauty guy" in the popular press. By the 1990s, Hickey had made a home in Las Vegas, from where he regularly traveled to speak with audiences worldwide.
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$27.95
Perfect Wave: More Essays on Art and Democracy
by Dave Hickey
A collection of essays by American art critic Dave Hickey, nicknamed “The Bad Boy of Art Criticism.”
When Dave Hickey was twelve, he rode the surfer’s dream: the perfect wave. And, like so many things in life we long for, it didn’t quite turn out—he shot the pier and dashed himself against the rocks of Sunset Cliffs in Ocean Beach, which nearly killed him.
Hickey went on to develop a career as one of America’s foremost critical iconoclasts, a trusted no-nonsense voice commenting on the worlds of art and culture. Perfect Wave brings together essays on a wide range of subjects from throughout Hickey’s career, displaying his breadth of interest and powerful insight into what makes art work, or not, and why we care. With Hickey as our guide, we travel to Disneyland and Vegas, London and Venice. We discover the genius of Karen Carpenter and Waylon Jennings, learn why Robert Mitchum matters more than Jimmy Stewart, and see how the stillness of Antonioni speaks to us today. Never slow to judge—or to surprise us in doing so—Hickey relates his wincing disappointment in the later career of his early hero Susan Sontag and shows us the appeal to our commonality that we’ve been missing in Norman Rockwell.
Bookended by previously unpublished personal essays that offer a new glimpse into Hickey’s own life—including the aforementioned conclusion to his surfing career—Perfect Wave is a welcome addition to the Hickey canon.
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25 Women: Essays on Their Art
by Dave Hickey
Newsweek calls him “exhilarating and deeply engaging.” Time Out New York calls him “smart, provocative, and a great writer.” Critic Peter Schjeldahl, meanwhile, simply calls him “My hero.” There’s no one in the art world quite like Dave Hickey—and a new book of his writing is an event.
25 Women will not disappoint. The book collects Hickey’s best and most important writing about female artists from the past twenty years. But this is far more than a compilation: Hickey has revised each essay, bringing them up to date and drawing out common themes. Written in Hickey’s trademark style—accessible, witty, and powerfully illuminating—25 Women analyzes the work of Joan Mitchell, Bridget Riley, Fiona Rae, Lynda Benglis, Karen Carson, and many others. Hickey discusses their work as work, bringing politics and gender into the discussion only where it seems warranted by the art itself. The resulting book is not only a deep engagement with some of the most influential and innovative contemporary artists, but also a reflection on the life and role of the critic: the decisions, judgments, politics, and ethics that critics negotiate throughout their careers in the art world.
Always engaging, often controversial, and never dull, Dave Hickey is a writer who gets people excited—and talking—about art. 25 Women will thrill his many fans, and make him plenty of new ones.
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Dave Hickey: Pirates and Farmers: Essays on Taste
by Dave Hickey
Dave Hickey examines contemporary art phenomena, from super-collectors to the trope of the biennale
Following the news of his self-imposed exile from art criticism, Dave Hickey’s newest body of essays questions and challenges the cultural status quo in his trademark witty style.
Arguably one of the most astute critics working today, Dave Hickey's multi-decade career as a leading cultural commentator is characterised by his blend of high and mass culture and his fervent critique of the celebrity-driven culture of the art world in the 21st century.
In his usual humorous manner, Hickey has declared that: ‘I miss being an elitist and not having to talk to idiots’ in a field that, he believes, is defined by the commoditisation of art and the self-referential tendencies of criticism itself.
Author of popular books Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy and The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty, this new body of shorter essays looks at more contemporary phenomena: super-collectors, the trope of the biennale and the loss of looking.
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Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy
by Dave Hickey
The 23 essays (or "love songs") that make up the now classic volume Air Guitar trawl a "vast, invisible underground empire" of pleasure, through record stores, honky-tonks, art galleries, jazz clubs, cocktail lounges, surf shops and hot-rod stores, as restlessly on the move as the America they depict. Air Guitar pioneered a kind of plain-talking in cultural criticism, willingly subjective and always candid and direct. A valuable reading tool for art lovers, neophytes, students and teachers alike, Hickey's book--now in its eighth printing--has galvanized a generation of art lovers, with new takes on Norman Rockwell, Robert Mapplethorpe, Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol and Perry Mason. In June 2009, Newsweek voted Air Guitar one of the top 50 books that "open a window on the times we live in, whether they deal directly with the issues of today or simply help us see ourselves in new and surprising ways," and described the book as "a seamless blend of criticism, personal history, and a deep appreciation for the sheer nuttiness of American life."
Dave Hickey (born 1939) is one of today's most revered and widely read art writers. He has written for Rolling Stone, Art News, Art in America, Artforum and Vanity Fair among many others.
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Feint of Heart: Art Writings 1982–2002
by Dave Hickey
“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.
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