Dave Hickey with Sari Carel for zingmagazine.com

Sari Carel: Often you discuss in your essays and writings a principle shift that occurred in American culture and economy as well as in the Art World starting in the early '70s. You describe this change as having considerable influence on the course of Contemporary Art since then. What are the origins and consequences of this paradigm shift? 

Dave Hickey: The art world tends to be driven by its market, and throughout the '50s and the '60s it was a relatively small art world with dealers and collectors and one or two small museums. It was during that period that the most powerful and permanent American art in this century was made—from Abstract Expressionism and Pop, to Minimalism and Post-Minimalism. It was, in a real sense, a great Mediterranean moment created by 4000 heavily medicated human beings. And then in the late '60s we had a little reformation privileging museums over dealers and universities over apprenticeship, a vast shift in the structure of cultural authority.

All of a sudden rather than an art world made up of critics and dealers, collectors and artists, you have curators, you have tenured theory professors, a public funding bureaucracy - you have all of these hierarchical authority figures selling a non-hierarchical ideology in a very hierarchical way. This really destroyed the dynamic of the art world in my view, simply because like most conservative reactions to the '60s it was aimed specifically at the destruction of sibling society - the society of contemporaries.

Photo of Dave Hickey by Peden+Munk

 

 

 

The art world from the late eighteenth century to the present has worked in a language of generations. Artists worked with their peers and among them to overthrow and supplant the generation in power. Then suddenly in the '70s you have artists who, rather than overthrowing their seniors, are pleasing them in order to get grades and public funding. That is exactly what my problem is with serving on National Endowment panels. I did it, and participated in it, but I have to admit that this is the first time in the history of American Art that an older generation has the authority to decide which works of the younger generation are privileged. This slowed down the style wheel to a virtual stop, and created a culture of mentors and protegés—a hierarchical, parental structure that would last as long as the National Endowment and the big museums and foundations had absolute power, say from '72 to '88. During this time, it was almost impossible for anything to change, because our culture is composed of a public academic and museum sector that changes slowly, and after the fact, in 30 year cycles, and a private gallery and magazine sector that changes rapidly, sometimes overnight. In the last ten years the academics who have been retiring from American universities are Abstract Expressionists and Formalists hired and tenured in the late '60s, just as these practices lost public credibility. They are being replaced with Deconstructionists who are already out of date, and who will be in power for the next 30 years, talking about stuff that is already over now. 

Here you will find more:

http://www.zingmagazine.com/zing14/hickey/