The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty. - book reviews

Art in America, Nov, 1994 by Peter Plagens

Although Dave Hickey's The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty is a brilliant little book of art criticism, it's mistitled. It should have been called "Four Essays Around Beauty" because, except for a perfunctory pass on the first page-where beauty is referred to as the agency that causes visual pleasure in the beholder - Hickey doesn't attempt to define beauty, or rehearse its history in Western art, or weigh competing theories about its nature, or even make an impassioned plea for its return to a proper place at the center of painting, sculpture and the various newer modes of modern art. Rather, like Homer limning Helen of Troy's drop-dead good looks by recounting their numbing effect on the citizenry, Hickey writes about the consequences of beauty - or the lack of it - in the contemporary art world.

And Lord, can he write. Compared to enjoying Hickey - who writes like a Raymond Chandler blessed with Giovanni Morelli's eye - reading any other art critic (and I mean any other art critic) is like doing your taxes. The Invisible Dragon begins,

I was drifting, daydreaming really, through the waning moments of a panel discussion on the subject of "What's Happening Now," drawing cartoon daggers on a yellow pad and vaguely formulating strategies for avoiding punch and cookies, when I realized that I was being addressed from the audience. . . . My fellow panelists gazed into the dark reaches of the balcony or examined their cuticles.

Hickey's interlocutor is a "lanky graduate student" (with - my guess - two gold earrings in one ear, a soul patch beneath his lower lip, an Alice in Chains T-shirt, and an uncracked Hal Foster paperback on his lap) who asks him what "The Issue of the Nineties" would be. "Beauty," Hickey replies off-handedly, then realizes that "the game [and this book] was afoot."

Hickey's game - to explain what the loss of a decent regard for beauty has wrought in contemporary art - is played out over four chapters: "Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty," "Nothing Like the Son: On Robert Mapplethorpe's X Portfolio," "Prom Night in Flatland: On the Gender of Works of Art" and "After the Great Tsunami: On Beauty and the Therapeutic Institution." His central idea is roughly this: Beauty, as a means and not an end, is what makes the content of art powerful to the beholder. Because it can be used to deliver almost any payload, from Catholic dogma to sexual outlawry, beauty is dangerous and subversive. Kings and dictators try to control the effects of beauty by mandating exactly what can and cannot be rendered beautiful in public. Polite bourgeois intellectuals try to neutralize beauty by turning it into an end in itself, i.e., formalism. The Marxist hall monitors of our current day (my description, not Hickey's) reject beauty because "beautiful art sells. If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells anything else, it is a seductive advertisement." I'd add that the more Shining Path-ish of leftist critics reject beauty because it's also oppressively elitist - the height of lookism. It just doesn't seem fair to them that one work of art should look really good to a whole lot of people for a very long time, while other works don't. (Hickey's own Hobson's choice among those who would control art: he prefers to suffer "an autocrat who monitors appearance" rather than "a bureaucrat who monitors desire.")

Because modem art constitutes, in Hickey's words, "the greatest flowering of unruly images in the history of man," beauty (which could make some of those unruly images and the unruly ideas behind them all too palatable to the body politic) has, in effect, been read out of the art of our time. It was exorcised not so much by artists as by museums, because they wanted to stay out of the fight over beauty among right-wing philistines, left-wing iconoclasts, and hidebound formalists. To try to accommodate all factions, our society has gradually come up with what Hickey calls "the therapeutic institution." That's any not-for-profit from the Metropolitan Museum to the Mattress Factory, any institution whose program says, in sum, that looking at art - all kinds of art in any maddening mix - is good for you.

The therapeutic institution has two big flaws that Hickey wishes were fatal. First, it trivializes art, like one of those passionately disputative faculty meetings where the dean adjourns by saying obliviously, "You know, the wonderful thing about this university is that we can all get together to disagree." Second, the chameleonish therapeutic institution can go irrelevantly on forever. Hickey concludes The Invisible Dragon with a telling point from G.B. Shaw: "Institutions collapse from lack of funding, they do not die from lack of meaning. We die from lack of meaning."

It's about the therapeutic institution - the unmasking of which is as popular a subject for art critics as Baudrillard's "simulacrum" - that Hickey is most right-on. He notes that over the last 30 years the American contemporary art world has expanded from "a tiny network of private galleries in New York" to a massive civil service of PhDs and MFAs who [administerl a monolithic system of interlocking patronage, which, in its constituents, [resembles] nothing so much as that of France in the early nineteenth century." He contends that although 60 percent of the criticism about historical art concerns itself with the influence of patronage, the critics of contemporary art whine about the "corruption of the market" but blithely consider certain kinds of offerings from non-profit institutions (e.g., the political-art installations in the last Whitney Biennial) to be squeaky-clean, patronagewise. If, for example, Leonard Lauder's museum shows a 1960s Rauschenberg silkscreen, everybody smells a market rat; but if the Whitney shows a Daniel J. Martinez installation, it's considered a form of selfless cultural charity. In spite of this, Hickey says, "it is not hard to detect the aroma of Caravaggio's [inquisitoriall priests as one treads the therapeutic institution's gray wool carpets or cools one's heels in its arctic waiting rooms."