QUILLBLOG

Dave Hickey makes a Believer out of Sheila Heti

There’s a great interview in the Dec/Nov issue of The Believer with notorious author and art critic Dave Hickey conducted by Toronto’s Sheila Heti.

The conversation ranges from the true nature of art, the role of criticism, Hickey’s current place in the art world, etc. – not the most thrilling-sounding stuff, but as James Wolcott writes on his blog, the interview is fun to read because Hickey “sounds like an actual human being talking, not a filtration device preening with little soundbites.”

For example, Hickey characterizes the whole notion of Fine Arts degrees as “training sissies for teaching jobs” and an efffort “to create an intellectual and pedagogical justification for the most frivolous activity in Western culture.”

Here are Hickey’s thoughts on arts in academia and government arts funding, a contentious topic this side of the border:

DH: I don’t think the government should touch art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage risk-averse personalities to be artists. Some good artists in their maturity – like me – will take a job at a university and continue to produce because they have trained themselves to produce. But the university environment is not a productive environment. It’s oppressive.

SH: It’s what?

DH: It’s not free. You cannot say what you want to. Let me explain. If I sell an article to Vanity Fair, they give me some money and we’re quits. I can take that money and spend it on heroin and Arab boys if I want to. But if I get the money I make from the university every year, that comes with a requirement that I not be a pedophile, that I not be a drug addict, that I not tell the truth, that I not say what I think about the president of the university. That’s what that money is. And if I take a job at a university and I’m a young person, I have six years in which I can’t express my opinion until I get tenure. Now, are you going to remember your opinions for six years? No!

SH: So if you eschew money from grants and from the government, then you’ve got to make money elsewhere–

DH: I wrote reviews of Porter Wagoner albums and squibs for titty magazines, but I fucking wrote them because I was trying to win and avoid all unavoidable compromises that presented me with the fantasies of comfort and security. I just like to write lucid prose. That’s my little thing. Why should it be easier for me than it was for Steve Tyler? Anyway, people don’t make literature, architecture, and art – the culture makes those things. We make books, buildings, and objects. We do our crummy little shit, and the culture assigns value to it, and I don’t think the culture needs government help.

How’s that for a Monday morning wake up call? Hickey also has some thoughts for those young or avant-garde writers and artists who feel they are not being given their due mainstream recognition:

The art world I came up into was very much like the jazz world I grew up in, which is to say, a relatively small thing. If you got to go see Miles Davis in a little bar on La Brea, that was great, and you didn’t sit around saying, “There was no coverage in the New York Times! Miles is not going to get any reviews!” You know what I’m saying?

Though Heti’s role in the interview is mostly to play straight (wo)man to Hickey, she does drop some hints about her own artistic future:

Increasingly I’m less interested in writing about fictional people, because it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story. I just – I can’t do it.

Uh, tiresome? As Hickey himself says, right at the beginning of the interview, about the creation of art: “if you don’t like it and it’s not easy, you shouldn’t be doing it.”