Episode 27: Daniel Oppenheimer on Dave Hickey

Dave Hickey was an inspirational character—a writer of essays and songs, an astute art and literary critic, a one-time gallerist and, certainly, an art-world provocateur. Hickey published his two most famous books in the 1990s, The Invisible Dragon—a call to reconsider beauty in art—and Air Guitar, a cult classic essay collection that exposed the more personal and venerable style of cultural criticism. Dave passed away at the age of 82, a few weeks after we recorded this interview with his biographer, Daniel Oppenheimer. Hickey's pariah status had by then waned, but he was the last of a certain school of rebel writers of the 1960s and 1970s who could still churn out consistently good work. Based in Austin, Texas, where Dave got his start as a gallerist—having opened A Clean, Well-Lighted Place in 1967—writer and now biographer Daniel Oppenheimer charts Hickey’s life and times in Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art, a smart, compact biography published by the University of Texas Press. Drawing from first-person interviews with Hickey, his wife and friends, comrades and critics, Oppenheimer helps explain Why Dave Hickey Matters and why we should read him, particularly his essay collections Air Guitar and Pirates and Farmers. With Hickey’s passing, this episode has become a tribute to the great Dave Hickey, as much as it was a good conversation with his biographer. He will be missed. But his writing will live on.