Latest Dave Hickey Quotes from Interviews

• I don't think the government should touch art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage risk-averse personalities to be artists.

  Dave Hickey

  Art, Thinking, Government

  Interview with Sheila Heti, believermag.com. November 2007.

• With the artists, I don't teach, I coach. I can't tell them how to make art. I tell them to make more art. I tell them to get up early and stay up late. I tell them not to quit. I tell them if somebody else is already making their work. My job is to be current with the discourse and not be an asshole. That's all I wanted in a professor.

  Dave Hickey

  Art, Jobs, Up Early

  Source: www.believermag.com

• When you really respect somebody who does something different from you, your respect is for the quality of the job.

  Dave Hickey

  Jobs, Quality, Doe

  Interview with Sheila Heti, believermag.com. November 2007.

• Gossip is the currency of the discourse, so you should shut up about yourself. Never confess, never explain, never apologize, and never complain.

  Dave Hickey

  Gossip, Complaining, Apologizing

  Interview with Sheila Heti, believermag.com. November 2007.

• Most famous artists are created by their work and the idea of them as a character, and if they're smart and ambitious, they reinforce that character because they want to win. They want their views to prevail.

  Dave Hickey

  Smart, Character, Artist

  Interview with Sheila Heti, believermag.com. November 2007.

• The idea of political content is irrelevant. Content is irrelevant. I always tell my students, "Never forget you're writing words! You know, word one, word two, word three, word four. The words have to be organized. Nothing else does."

  Dave Hickey

  Writing, Ideas, Two

  Interview with Sheila Heti, believermag.com. November 1, 2007.

• Art has political consequences, which is to say, it reorganizes society and creates constituencies of people around it.

  Dave Hickey

  Art, People, Political

  Interview with Sheila Heti, believermag.com. November 2007.

• I have no evangelical feelings about art at all. I despise art education. Art doesn't lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It's a set of propositions about how things should look.

  Dave Hickey

  Art, Feelings, Looks

  Interview with Sheila Heti, believermag.com. November 2007.

• I think that if you don't like something and it's not easy, you shouldn't be doing it.

  Dave Hickey

  Thinking, Easy, Like Something

  Source: www.believermag.com

• In my experience, you always think you know what you're doing; you always think you can explain, but you always discover, years later, that you didn't and you couldn't. This leads me to suspect that the principal function of human reason is to rationalize what your lizard brain demands of you. That's my idea.

  Dave Hickey

  Thinking, Years, Ideas

  Interview with Sheila Heti, believermag.com. November 2007.

• Art and writing come from somewhere down around the lizard brain. It's a much more peculiar activity than we like to think it is. The problems arise when we try to domesticate the practice, to pretend that it's a normal human activity and that "everybody's creative." They're not.

  Dave Hickey

  Art, Writing, Thinking

  Interview with Sheila Heti, believermag.com. November 2007.