Details

ISBN-10: 0226333191
ISBN-13: 9780226333199
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publish Date: 10/02/2012
Dimensions: 7.25" L, 6.00" W, 0.50" H

The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty (Revised, Expanded)

Paperback

Price: $15.00

Overview

The Invisible Dragon made a lot of noise for a little book When it was originally published in 1993 it was championed by artists for its forceful call for a reconsideration of beauty–and savaged by more theoretically oriented critics who dismissed the very concept of beauty as naive, igniting a debate that has shown no sign of flagging.

With this revised and expanded edition, Hickey is back to fan the flames. More manifesto than polite discussion, more call to action than criticism, The Invisible Dragon aims squarely at the hyper-institutionalism that, in Hickey’s view, denies the real pleasures that draw us to art in the first place. Deploying the artworks of Warhol, Raphael, Caravaggio, and Mapplethorpe and the writings of Ruskin, Shakespeare, Deleuze, and Foucault, Hickey takes on museum culture, arid academicism, sclerotic politics, and more–all in the service of making readers rethink the nature of art. A new introduction provides a context for earlier essays–what Hickey calls his “intellectual temper tantrums.” A new essay, “American Beauty,” concludes the volume with a historical argument that is a rousing paean to the inherently democratic nature of attention to beauty.

Written with a verve that is all too rare in serious criticism, this expanded and refurbished edition of The Invisible Dragon will be sure to captivate a new generation of readers, provoking the passionate reactions that are the hallmark of great criticism.

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Reviews
"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."– "New York Review of Books"
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Details

ISBN-10: 0226333191
ISBN-13: 9780226333199
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publish Date: 10/02/2012
Dimensions: 7.25" L, 6.00" W, 0.50" H
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