| | BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 5.75 x 9 in. / 160 pgs / 10 color / 4 bw. PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 10/24/2023
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Catalog: FALL 2023 p. 66 PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9798987596500 TRADE
List Price: $27.95 CAD $39.95 GBP £22.00 AVAILABILITY
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| | | The Invisible DragonEssays on Beauty and Other Matters: 30th Anniversary EditionBy Dave Hickey. Edited with afterword by Gary Kornblau.
 “If this book of shocking intelligence and moral hope is read widely and above all well, word for word, it will help the world.” —Peter SchjeldahlAn expanded edition of Hickey’s controversial and exquisitely written apologia for beauty—championed by artists, reviled by art critics, and as powerful as ever 30 years onThe 30th anniversary cloth edition brings back into print Dragon’s four essays on beauty and commingles them with newly discovered essays by the MacArthur Foundation “genius.” Art by Caravaggio, Bellini, Velázquez, Raphael, Warhol and Mapplethorpe is complemented by Hickey’s tributes to Dolly Parton and Richard Pryor, outing of John Rechy’s gay novel Numbers, essays on the art of writing and witty analysis of paintings by Ed Ruscha. An afterword by Hickey’s friend and Dragon’s editor queers the brash, heterosexual gambler as it situates the creation of Dragon squarely within the AIDS plague. At the time, the book made beauty visible under the looming presence of death and bodily decay. Today, Hickey’s prescient diagnosis of the “therapeutic institution” resonates even louder and 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 the turn of the 21st century. A MacArthur "Genius" Fellow known as the "beauty guy" in the popular press, Hickey 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 coined and helped create the "Outlaw country" music movement. By the 1990s, Hickey had made a home in Las Vegas, from where he regularly traveled to speak with audiences worldwide.
PRAISE AND REVIEWSAuthor of Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees Lawrence Weschler Dave Hickey's prose transports are like an eye attached to a butterfly attached to a rocketship—which is to say, lucidity uncannily yoked to both a deft lightness of touch and sheer gangbusters propulsion: the down-to-earth, time and again, taking off and taking flight. The generosity of the man's verve—the suppleness of its profusions—can get to be downright ravishing. On top of which, the guy's really funny. "Author of Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018" Peter Schjeldahl If the book of shocking intelligence and moral hope is read widely and above all well, word for word, it will help the world. New York Review of Books Jarrett Earnest When Dave Hickey died last fall at the age of eighty-two, he left behind a singular contribution to the history of art writing, along with a badly bruised reputation, both routinely called 'iconoclastic' for lack of anything more precise. The magazines he’d published in since the 1960s hardly took notice. The perfunctory obituaries that did appear treated him as a kind of Hunter S. Thompson of the contemporary art world, ensconced as he was in Las Vegas at the height of his fame. But alongside the bluster of 'the bad boy of art criticism' was a neon Walter Pater of the Southwest who almost single-handedly remade the practice of art writing with his first two collections, The Invisible Dragon and Air Guitar. Dolly Parton Dave Hickey was a genius. Not because of what he did for me but because of the way he was, the way he felt and the wonderful way he worded things, he was beyond compare. I liked him, I loved him and yes, I had a crush on him too. Long live the memory and the words of Dave Hickey. Los Angeles Times Christopher Knight Turned art criticism on its head when first published three decades ago. L.A. -based publisher Art Issues celebrates that landmark anniversary with a revealingly queer frame of reference—the brutal AIDS crisis then raging. LA Weekly Shana Nys Dambrot Essential art curriculum reading, definitely. Compact Today’s art world is even more consumed by the same ideological preoccupations that began to take precedence in the early ’90s. Hence why this is an opportune moment for Art Issues Press’s release of a new, expanded edition of The Invisible Dragon. Artforum Zack Hatfield He never sought to impose a rigid criterion of beauty, instead exemplifying it through his own ravishing, euphonious prose, so much so that The Invisible Dragon is often itself described as a “work of art.” |
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| | FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/24/2023 Tuesday, October 24 at 6:30 PM, McNally Jackson Soho presents the NYC launch of the expanded 30th Anniversary Edition of Dave Hickey's controversial and exquisitely written apologia for beauty, The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty and Other Matters. Join Art Issues Press for readings by Felix Bernstein, Gabe Rubin, Stephanie LaCava, Domenick Ammirati, Paige K. Bradley and Christopher Bollen, as well as remarks on the genesis of the book by its original publisher and editor, Gary Kornblau, and a special musical performance by Laura Ortman commemorating the concurrent release of Life As We Know It, a long-lost album of songs written, produced and sung by Hickey.
continue to blogFROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/4/2023 Featured spreads are from the new, expanded and clothbound thirtieth-anniversary edition of Dave Hickey’s game-changing essay collection, The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty and Other Matters—out now and selling like hotcakes from original publisher Art Issues Press. In his foreword, editor and publisher Gary Kornblau situates the book, now and then. “1993: The plague of AIDS rages through yet another decade. I come into my own amid the terror and tristesse. Dave Hickey finds himself ensconsed in Las Vegas, Nevada, where he is resuscitating a tattered life and career. He sits down to rewrite a few ‘fugitive critiques,’ and we design a divertimento, The Invisible Dragon. To the surprise of both of us, the book ignites a firestorm, and from its ashes ‘beauty’ arises as a dominant force in artistic life. Academics argue about theoretical minutiae. Artists pass the book around like a samizdat. … [Here] I intersperse orphaned texts among Dragon’s essays on beauty to create an alternative narrative. In the afterword, I recall the brash, heterosexual author and me as the most unlikely of queer pals. (I ‘queer’ Hickey, in the argot of the day.) I situate the meanings of Dragon within the trauma of the AIDS plague, where the book first found its footing. For me—even more so as I age—Dragon makes beauty visible under the looming presence of death and bodily decay. I remix and embed unapologetically to keep Hickey’s renegade spirit alive. I pirate his book on beauty, as Hickey pirated beauty himself.” continue to blogFROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/4/2023Featured spreads are from the new, expanded and clothbound thirtieth-anniversary edition of Dave Hickey’s game-changing essay collection, The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty and Other Matters—out now and selling like hotcakes from original publisher Art Issues Press. In his foreword, editor and publisher Gary Kornblau situates the book, now and then. “1993: The plague of AIDS rages through yet another decade. I come into my own amid the terror and tristesse. Dave Hickey finds himself ensconsed in Las Vegas, Nevada, where he is resuscitating a tattered life and career. He sits down to rewrite a few ‘fugitive critiques,’ and we design a divertimento, The Invisible Dragon. To the surprise of both of us, the book ignites a firestorm, and from its ashes ‘beauty’ arises as a dominant force in artistic life. Academics argue about theoretical minutiae. Artists pass the book around like a samizdat. … [Here] I intersperse orphaned texts among Dragon’s essays on beauty to create an alternative narrative. In the afterword, I recall the brash, heterosexual author and me as the most unlikely of queer pals. (I ‘queer’ Hickey, in the argot of the day.) I situate the meanings of Dragon within the trauma of the AIDS plague, where the book first found its footing. For me—even more so as I age—Dragon makes beauty visible under the looming presence of death and bodily decay. I remix and embed unapologetically to keep Hickey’s renegade spirit alive. I pirate his book on beauty, as Hickey pirated beauty himself.” continue to blog | OF RELATED INTEREST |  | Art Issues PressISBN: 9780963726452
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