Feint of Heart: Art Writings, 1982-2002

Dave Hickey (1938–2021) was an American art critic and essayist known for his sharp wit and keen eye. In the late sixties, he opened A Clean Well-Lighted Place—an art gallery in Austin named after the short story by Ernest Hemingway—before moving to New York, where he worked as the director of the Reese Palley Gallery. He served as the executive editor for Art in America; staff songwriter at Glaser Publications, in Nashville; and arts editor for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He later served as associate professor of art criticism and theory at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His writing appeared in publications including Rolling Stone, Harper’s, The Village Voice, and Vanity Fair, as well as numerous exhibition catalogues. He received the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award in 1994 and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2001 for his influential art criticism. His books include The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1993) and Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997).Jarrett Earnest is the author of What It Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (2018) and Valid Until Sunset (2023) as well as editor of The Young and Evil: Queer Modernism in New York, 1930–1955 (2020), Painting Is a Supreme Fiction: Writings by Jesse Murry, 1980–1993 (2021), and Devotion: today’s future becomes tomorrow archive (2022). His criticism has been published in magazines and exhibition catalogues around the world, and appears regularly in the New York Review of Books.

'Dave Hickey’s writing is an atomic bomb of wild styling, brilliant insight, philosophical leaps of a visionary imagination, and astral projections of sixth-sense taste. A perfect combination of Billy the Kid, Waylon Jennings, and Oscar Wilde.' - Jerry Saltz, Senior Art Critic, New York magazine