Damien Hirst Andy Warhol Cy Twombly Dan Flavin Donald Judd Takashi Murakami Jeff Koons John Mclaughlin

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The web exclusive that follows is an extension
of Conversation with Dave Hickey, an article originally published in the March 2008 issue of Art+Auction.

NEW YORK—What do you make of the current perception that collecting contemporary art is a lifestyle choice?

It’s just new people learning to be rich—no big deal.  What are the ramifications of that?  None, unless you’re an art critic.

As a professor of art criticism and theory at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, how do you talk with your students about the market?

I tell them that every art dealer represents 10 to 15 people to whom he or she can sell something if worst comes to worst. So if a dealer doesn’t like your art, what the dealer means is, “I can’t sell this to Dr. Levine, and if Dr. Levine doesn’t buy it, then none of the proctologists in Beverly Hills will buy it. And I won’t make my nut in July.” Very deep.

Let’s consider a few artists who have gotten a lot of attention lately. What’s your take on Takashi Murakami, who has just had a major exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles?

Is it a thoughtful retrospective? No, it’s basically a commercial project, a Super Bowl half-time extravaganza. I like Murakami’s work—he has correctly followed the trend toward industrialized art—but it’s no longer of interest to me. On the other hand, look at Jeff Koons. I happen to like his work, too, and strangely enough, he actually has a pretty good bibliography. A lot of people have written about him because they perceive some public consequence in his oeuvre. No one has written positively about him, of course, but it’s not the judgment; it’s the attention.

And Damien Hirst?

For many years everyone presumed that Andy Warhol was an ironic artist. We went through this phase, and then we realized that Andy wasn’t being ironic at all. But there is still something to look at in Warhol’s work. Let’s say you buy a butterfly painting or a skull painting by Damien Hirst, and one day you discover it’s not ironic. Suddenly you’ve got a piece of derivative dreck! You’ve got a piece of faculty art. I don’t think Hirst could survive the collapse of our presumption that he is being ironic.

What’s more shocking: Warhol’s Green Car Crash selling for $71 million, or Koons’s Hanging Heart selling for $23.6 million?

I don’t find either particularly shocking. What I find shocking is that the Magna Carta sold for only $30 million! The big prices that are holding up in general—aside from those for Peter Doig, whom I consider the bête noire of contemporary painting, whom I wouldn’t let into my graduate program—are for artists who have a reputation for having been written about by serious people and having been shown by serious people: Judd, Flavin, Twombly.

But these days not all high-priced artists necessarily have those things.

True! And it’s those prices that I worry about. Art lives in memory. If you can’t remember it, you’re in trouble. I vaguely remember a dot painting by Damien Hirst, but I can immediately recall a hundred dot paintings by Peter Young, and I could buy them all for the price of one Damien Hirst. If I could, I would, but that’s just me. I have my McLaughlin principle, which is, How many John McLaughlins could I buy for this? I met someone in Miami who applies the same principle. I think 15 McLaughlins would make me happier than one Eric Fischl.

"Conversation with Dave Hickey—Part 2" is a web exclusive published in conjunction with the March 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's March 2008 Table of Contents.