The Consequences of Beauty

In “Enter the Dragon: The Vernacular of Beauty,” Dave Hickey proclaims beauty to be the issue of the 90’s.  Hickey does not attempt to define beauty or weigh competing theories about its nature.  Instead, he writes about the consequences of beauty, or the lack of it in the contemporary art world.

In his writing, he explains what the loss of a decent regard for beauty has wrought in contemporary art.  His main argument is that beauty is what makes the content of art powerful to the beholder; beauty is dangerous and revolutionary.  Hickey then begins to talk about Kings and how they try to control the effects of beauty by mandating exactly what can and cannot be rendered beautiful in public.  Bourgeois intellectuals try to neutralize beauty by turning it into an end itself.  Hickey notes, “They value images that promise pleasure and excitement.  Those that keep this promise are admitted to the court those that fail are subject to the king’s justice, which can be cruel and autocratic indeed...Art dealers are also like Foucault’s king in that they do not care “what it means” (Hickey 7).  As he states earlier, Hickey believes art dealers, like kings, only care how it looks rather than really caring about what the art means.  This is a corruptive way of finding something such as art to be beautiful.

As Hickey continues his argument, he talks about art in the market and in politics.  He boldly states, “beauty sells.”  Hickey also notes that there are issues with advancing images that are worth admiring.  No image is unbreakable in visual politics; every image has the potential of being powerful.  Hickey says, “The fluid nuancing of pleasure, power, and beauty is serious business in this culture” (Hickey 9).  In this case, the task of beauty is to show off and acknowledge this power that the image holds.  This inevitably creates visual pleasure for its viewers.

Hickey explains that this idea of making something beautiful is “the keystone of our cultural vernacular—the lover’s machine gun and the prisoner’s joy—the last redoubt of the disenfranchised and the single direct route, without a detour through the church or state, from the image to the individual” (Hickey 12).  However, he claims that now the route from the image to the beholder involves a detour.  This detour blinds the viewer from the beauty of the image.

I found Hickey’s piece to be intriguing yet wordy.  He presents a strong argument regarding beauty and the lack of it in contemporary art in the 20^th century.  However, his argument skips from thought to thought and his sentences are full of so much information that it is hard to follow what he is trying to say.  Hickey begins by talking about how he is sketching and improvising this idea of beauty when unexpectedly called upon.  He then moves into his argument regarding beauty and art.  From there, he gets into a lot of different topics and his writing moves quickly; I had a blank stare on my face by the end of the packet.  I personally had to go back and read through it a second time and read some paragraphs multiple times more to try to grasp his central argument. 

From what I understand, I think Hickey has a strong argument, especially regarding beauty and the art market.  People are more concerned with the money value of a piece of work and how beautiful it will look on display rather than finding the deeper beauty or meaning of the piece that is connected to the message the artist is trying to convey.  This lack of meaning and connection with these images takes away from the true beauty of art.


-kristen