Mind the Gap is getting some new guest visitors from Google, people searching for answers to big questions such as, "What is beauty?" After 2 a.m., who knows what windows open up that compel us to ask a machine such a question. Anyway, these late night visitors were of some comfort to me because Hickey's text has left me digging around deep in the mush of my own definitions of things. Much of my musing is focused on the ways in which institutions deflate the risk out of experiencing art, and the … [Read more...]

By Corey DargelThe author, Dave Hickey, writes in response to the question of how to transplant his argument from visual art to music: The argument I'm making is essentially formal and abstract. It does presuppose culturally acquired musical assumptions, of course. I am proposing that works of art that are sufficiently patterned and sufficiently surprising are receptive to radical interpretation regardless of their narrative content. In culture, formal devices can take on ambient and often … [Read more...]

By Corey DargelIn the first essay from The Invisible Dragon, Dave Hickey argues that arbiters and artists care too much about the meaning of art and not enough about whether it gives us pleasure. His focus is on visual art: Since pleasure is the true occasion for looking at anything, any theory of images that is not grounded in the pleasure of the beholder begs the question of art's efficacy and dooms itself to inconsequence... If [images] only do things after we have talked about them, then … [Read more...]

Welcome to the second Blogger Book Club. Today we dive into Dave Hickey's The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty. For anyone out there who would like to play along, please don't be shy about jumping in. We'll pass the Chex Mix your way. In preparation for this convo, Corey and I had a quick phone chat yesterday about how Hickey's arguments, based in the world of visual art, can and cannot be applied to the field of music. Has music faced the same conflicts in the 20th century that Hickey points … [Read more...]

I'm cruising (okay, okay, more like trudging) through the end of next week's blogger book club book: The Invisible Dragon, by Dave Hickey. I've found it to be a great read, brimming with ideas I want to try out in the context of music, but it's also been a challenge. There are a considerable number of visual art scene insider references and grad-school vocabulary words. Seriously, it's really only at times like these that I think I may have missed out by passing on getting an advanced degree. I … [Read more...]