41 Quotes by Dave Hickey

My mother was an economics professor. I’m proficient in math, and statistics, game theory, symbolic logic and all of that.

I have no evangelical feelings about art at all. I despise art education. Art doesn’t lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It’s a set of propositions about how things should look.

Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else’s privilege.

Even if one succeeds in making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, there remains the problem of what to do with a one-eared sow.

If I go to London, everyone wants to talk about Damien Hirst. I’m just not interested in him. Never have been.

Art editors and critics – people like me – have become a courtier class.

Most famous artists are created by their work and the idea of them as a character, and if they’re smart and ambitious, they reinforce that character because they want to win. They want their views to prevail.

Art and writing come from somewhere down around the lizard brain. It’s a much more peculiar activity than we like to think it is. The problems arise when we try to domesticate the practice, to pretend that it’s a normal human activity and that “everybody’s creative.” They’re not.

The idea of political content is irrelevant. Content is irrelevant. I always tell my students, “Never forget you’re writing words! You know, word one, word two, word three, word four. The words have to be organized. Nothing else does.”