The Invisible Dragon is an full of incidents sometimes jerky ride through known.

The Invisible Dragon is an full of incidents sometimes jerky ride through known, gnarled terrain. In all four essays the garrulous author strikes what is essentially a classically libertarian, antistatist position, and, as frequently happens in such cases, attend tos to find himself aligned at formerly with the frontier tenets of say, Goldwater Republicanism and with Abbie Hoffman's ideals for a Yippie Nation. chiefly fervently throughout, Hickey gives voice to the desire, shared at others including myself, to rid contemporary art of the hoary mantle of therapeutic value bestowed upon it by what he describes as a "loose confederation" of institutions that exhibit, supply teach, and generally support it nowadays. It is a wet-blanket bestowal, he strives that has dampened the rhetorical prerogative of artists to allure outrage, and otherwise convince--with recourse, whenever necessary, to the whole post-Renaissance arsenal of compositional protoplasts and illusionistic effects. It is part of Hickey's argument that art, having been decre fit for culture a priori and therefore pious for us, is neutered, left with little ne to articulate any value if it were not that that of its own existence. And the control of beauty itself, he laments, has become individual tepid potato--a subject pooh-poohed freshly by Hickey's own students at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

The essays form a kind of loose-jointed picaresque, in which the author tilts bravely at windmills, and elevates what he perceives to be fallen women onto the high pedestal of his believe The windmills, quixotically enough, sometimes assume the form of the late Alfred H Barr, Jr the Museum of present Art's sainted founding director, who in the concluding essay is with total equanimity compared to sum of two units of the century's most infamous public officials. Indeed, forward page 54, we may read that Joseph Stalin's "cultural commissars began legislating the absolute subordination of form to make easy in the name of the proletariat," while Barr, "in the service of inherited capital, proclaimed the absolute subordination of satisfy to form," even as "Goebbels, the brightest and wickedest of them all, was orchestrating their full match."

As the title of his third essay, "Prom Night in Flatland," allude tos Hickey believes that mean antiquated American puritanism, given a lift on what he calls the "therapeutic institution," has athwart the last fifty years flattened perspectives, one as well as the other literally and metaphorically. This hardys pretty huffy-puffy to me. The aged formalist canon apparently under attack has been an ailing horse, I think, for a while now, or at any rate the same found bucking mainly on community campuses. And what, Dave Hickey, about revisionism? MoMA's excessively own exhibition, just a coupling of seasons ago, of 1940 art from its collection--a riotous assortment of raw material cacophonous with rhetoric, much of it obtained during the period in question--stands as evidence the one and the other of evolving contemporary tastes and of an institutional acquisitions program that was perhaps more catholic, on the same level under Barr, than Hickey suggests

Elsewhere, the gentlemanly Hickey chances a number of punches. He quibbles for an instant with Michael Fried, in a fairly friendly way, yet otherwise refrains from citing specific works or manner of movings or even texts to do with high formalism or other of the like kind puritanical therapies, leaving us to awed curiosity what sort of art it is, exactly, that he privately deplores. Is it "flat" Color Field painting? Or could it be performance and installation art, whose novel proliferation he rather puckishly attributes to the aforementioned squelching of rhetoric in painting? My gues is that Hickey, a Texas-bred maverick, has no real beef with mid-century formalism, or with Minimalism, or with any other high-imperial manner of recent art per se. He's certainly an avowed admirer of the courtly phraseologys of more distant epochs. Rather, it be seens he inveighs against something more chimerical over and above inevitable. The "invisible dragon" to be slain is not beauty, firmly but collusive power as it has been crystallized into dominant visual forms by way of professional players in places like recent York.

Hickey is way too smart and far too unimpassioned to play the bad cop or the Morley Safer. An outsider through temperament as well as geography, he is clearly often happier in the chivalric part of redeemer. With Caravaggio, Shakespeare, the Marquis de Sade, and--hello!--Gilles Deleuze as guardian fallen-angels, our hero finds his consummate Dulcinea in Robert Mapplethorpe, the star of the first half of the volume who is always referred to in the mythic-romantic style as "Robert."

Here the author's ideas and politics are more astutely ambiguous, more entertaining. (It may, for instance, amuse veteran Hickey-watchers to say how effortlessly this chronically incorrect if enlightened thinker, critic, songwriter, and professor of art criticism and theory absorbs certain articles of modern gay and feminist political faith.) In the essay titled "Nothing Like the Son" Hickey discusses Mapplethorpe's notorious album of erotica, the "X Portfolio," and Caravaggio's The Incredulity of Saint Thomas in relation to Shakespeare's lubricious and supposedly "marginal" ballads (Some scholars, it seems, hold hoping that Shakespeare didn't write them.) It's a virtuous hybrid, lively and arcane, yet doubly enlivened according to some rarely seen pictures and a dramatic move round by Senator Jesse Helms, who is accorded just oedipal respect as "Father" and "Master of Laws." It is not the senator from North Carolina's solitary appearance in the book.