Like Greil Marcus writing about music , or Jed Perl and the late Peter Schjeldahl writing about art, Dave Hickey’s essays are interesting whether or not you’re interested in the artist or art he is discussing. As he says himself in a 1982 essay on Ed Ruscha, “criticism is not about art, it is only thinking ‘in the neighborhood of art.’” What Hickey is after, as editor Jarrett Earnest notes in Feint of Heart’s introduction, is “a mode of writing that replicates the experience of great art without reducing any of its power”; it is an effort “to craft living literature disguised as art criticism.”
The art Hickey was drawn to was eclectic and his opinions were clearly influenced by the fact that he lived and taught in Las Vegas, far from the art world of New York City, with its blandishments and demands. Hickey also wrote about music for Rolling Stone, and the lively style of a magazine journalist blends surprisingly well with the confidence of the professor who seems, casually, to know just about everything. Even the book’s title — a nod to a painting by Ruscha — suggests something of Hickey’s sense of ironic humor. His ideas and opinions are bold and boldly stated, so he’s hardly “faint of heart,” but his heart — that is, his affections and passions for the art he’s writing “in the neighborhood of” — is often given to “feints,” quick and deceptive rhetorical moves, as he elegantly gambols from one thought to another.
Hickey died in November of 2021, so the 20 essays in Feint of Heart — all written between 1982 and 2002, and mostly for exhibition catalogues — are from the first part of his career, what Earnest calls his “golden period,” when he was writing memorable books like The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1993) and Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997). In keeping with Hickey’s catholic tastes, Feint of Heart covers artists both well- and lesser-known.