Old Masters and New Lessons - Grant Kester

eexamine the origins of the aesthetic in early modern philosophy. What they have found there is
a concept of aesthetic knowledge that is rooted in both the private body and the body politic. In
fact, it is in the very nature of the aesthetic that it is located at the intersection between the
experience of subjective autonomy and the subject-positions provided by a dominant culture.
Hickey's book did much to reignite interest in the powerful visual experience provided by
the work of art, but his argument loses its focus at precisely the point at which this experience
engages with broader forms of discursive knowledge and public subjectivity. Hickey begins his
book by evoking a nightmarishly Orwellian scenario in which a politically correct thought police
dominate a well-funded network of "alternative" art spaces. This liberal elite, painfully out of
touch with the vox populi of good old-fashioned bodily experience, have shackled the
subversively beautiful art object in the basement in order to satisfy their fiendish desire to
improve and infantilize the museum-going public. Hickey establishes a curious parallel between
the alternative arts sector and the world of private galleries and auction houses. Thus, a
"massive civil service" of arts administrators in charge of a vast apparatus of "publicly funded"
exhibition spaces is juxtaposed to a "handful" of beleaguered dealers and gallery owners, who,
if somewhat too ready to "nibble canapes on the Concorde," are at least honest about their
relationship to the market and are more than willing to embrace the ambiguous pleasures of
aesthetic desire.(4) The fact that this characterization could be persuasively advanced at a time
when literally dozens of nonprofit exhibition spaces, publications, and media centers were being
forced to close owing to drastic funding cuts and conservative political attacks suggests the
emotional power of Hickey's underlying message for many in the art world.
Hickey's essays deploy all the accouterments of classic bohemianism; "the street" is a
persistent point of reference, along with sneering references to scandalized "church ladies."(5)
We find him rifling through Mapplethorpe's "X" portfolio in a "coke dealer's penthouse," or
evoking the origins of Mapplethorpe's work in "smoky, crowded rooms with raw brick walls [and]
sawhorse bars."(6) Hickey poses as a kind of critic provocateur, hurling his "outrageous" epithets
at the indifferent monolith of the art establishment.(7) At the center of this avant-garde mise en
scene is the artwork that magically eludes any deadening "institutional" mediation to strike up a
direct and spontaneous relationship with the viewer. This exchange may take place in a