The Invisible Dragon

He never sought to impose a rigid criterion of beauty, instead exemplifying it through his own ravishing, euphonious prose, so much so that The Invisible Dragon is often itself described as a “work of art.” -- Zack Hatfield * Artforum *
Today’s art world is even more consumed by the same ideological preoccupations that began to take precedence in the early ’90s. Hence why this is an opportune moment for Art Issues Press’s release of a new, expanded edition of The Invisible Dragon. * Compact *
Essential art curriculum reading, definitely. -- Shana Nys Dambrot * LA Weekly *
Turned art criticism on its head when first published three decades ago. L.A. -based publisher Art Issues celebrates that landmark anniversary with a revealingly queer frame of reference—the brutal AIDS crisis then raging. -- Christopher Knight * Los Angeles Times *
Dave Hickey was a genius. Not because of what he did for me but because of the way he was, the way he felt and the wonderful way he worded things, he was beyond compare. I liked him, I loved him and yes, I had a crush on him too. Long live the memory and the words of Dave Hickey. -- Dolly Parton
When Dave Hickey died last fall at the age of eighty-two, he left behind a singular contribution to the history of art writing, along with a badly bruised reputation, both routinely called 'iconoclastic' for lack of anything more precise. The magazines he’d published in since the 1960s hardly took notice. The perfunctory obituaries that did appear treated him as a kind of Hunter S. Thompson of the contemporary art world, ensconced as he was in Las Vegas at the height of his fame. But alongside the bluster of 'the bad boy of art criticism' was a neon Walter Pater of the Southwest who almost single-handedly remade the practice of art writing with his first two collections, The Invisible Dragon and Air Guitar. -- Jarrett Earnest * New York Review of Books *
If the book of shocking intelligence and moral hope is read widely and above all well, word for word, it will help the world. -- Peter Schjeldahl * "Author of Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018" *
Dave Hickey's prose transports are like an eye attached to a butterfly attached to a rocketship—which is to say, lucidity uncannily yoked to both a deft lightness of touch and sheer gangbusters propulsion: the down-to-earth, time and again, taking off and taking flight. The generosity of the man's verve—the suppleness of its profusions—can get to be downright ravishing. On top of which, the guy's really funny. -- Lawrence Weschler * Author of Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees *