In Conversation: Christopher Knight and Lari Pittman on Dave Hickey
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From Here, It Looks Like This
A conversation about Dave Hickey with Christopher Knight and Lari Pittman, moderated by Jarrett Earnest
To celebrate the release of Feint of Heart: Art Writings, 1982–2002 by the late art critic Dave Hickey, painter Lari Pittman and writer Christopher Knight will discuss their longtime friend’s astonishing and complex legacy, exploring Hickey’s incomparable impact on art writing from the vantage of the art and culture of Los Angeles in the 1990s. The conversation will be moderated by Jarrett Earnest, the anthology’s editor.
Dave Hickey was a singular voice on art, music, democracy, and culture. Known for his radical criticism, he united different worlds through a range of literary styles and techniques to ultimately explore what it means to be human. Feint of Heart unites twenty of Hickey’s characteristically astute essays on art from over twenty years, most of which were originally published in exhibition catalogues that are long out of print. The result is a volume that shows the writer at his most creative and incisive in an ever-relevant exploration of beauty and value.
Kindly note that space is limited and RSVP is required at rsvp-losangeles@davidzwirner.com.
Preorder Feint of Heart: Art Writings, 1982–2002 here.
Dave Hickey (1938–2021) was an American art critic and essayist known for his sharp wit and keen eye. In the late 1960s, he opened A Clean Well-Lighted Place, an art gallery in Austin, Texas, named after a short story by Ernest Hemingway, before moving to New York, where he worked as the director of Reese Palley Gallery. He served as executive editor of Art in America; staff songwriter at Glaser Publications, Nashville; and arts editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He later served as associate professor of art criticism and theory at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His writing appeared in publications including Rolling Stone, Harper’s, The Village Voice, and Vanity Fair, as well as numerous exhibition catalogues. He received the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award in 1994 and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2001 for his influential art criticism. His books include The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1993) and Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997).
Christopher Knight is art critic for the Los Angeles Times. He is the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Knight received the 1997 Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism from the College Art Association, becoming the first journalist to win the award in over twenty-five years. Before his career as a journalist, he served as curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego and was a consultant to the Lannan Foundation and the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Lari Pittman is an artist and Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Painting and Drawing at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. Inspired by commercial advertising, folk art, and decorative traditions, his meticulously layered paintings transform pattern and signage into luxurious scenes fraught with complexity, difference, and desire. In a manner both visually gripping and psychologically strange, Pittman’s hallucinatory works reference myriad aesthetic styles, from Victorian silhouettes to Social Realist murals to Mexican retablos. His work is the subject of Dave Hickey's 1996 essay "The Self-Reliant Seductress Visits the Museum."
Jarrett Earnest is a writer, curator, and editor living in New York. He is the author of What It Means to Write about Art: Interviews with Art Critics (2018) and Valid until Sunset (2023) as well as the host of Angelic Transmissions, an art talk show on East Village Radio. His criticism has appeared in exhibition catalogues and publications around the world, including regularly in The New York Review of Books. He edited and wrote the introduction to Feint of Heart: Art Writings, 1982–2002 by Dave Hickey.