I hate all that woozy political and psychotherapeutic crap applied to books and art.

- Dave Hickey

Art has political consequences, which is to say, it reorganizes society and creates constituencies of people around it.

- Dave Hickey

It used to be that if you stood in front of a painting you didn't understand, you'd have some obligation to guess. Now you don't.

- Dave Hickey

In my experience, you always think you know what you're doing; you always think you can explain, but you always discover, years later, that you didn'…

- Dave Hickey

In images,... beauty was the agency that caused visual pleasure in the beholder; and any theory of images that was not grounded in the pleasure of th…

- Dave Hickey

Beauty is and always will be blue skies and open highway.

- Dave Hickey

Where do you learn how to act? Not at church. America is a lot more like pagan Rome than we think. We still sacrifice to objects to gain our social g…

- Dave Hickey

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 …

- Dave Hickey

Beautiful art sells. If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells anything else, it is a seductive advertisement.

- Dave Hickey