Life’s reward: UNLV professor gets $500,000 for MacArthur Fellowship

By Ed Koch

Wednesday, Oct. 24, 2001 | 10:02 a.m.

There was a time when art critic and freelance writer Dave Hickey worried that if he didn't work on a given day, he wouldn't have the money to eat weeks later.

Although his financial situation long ago changed for the better -- he has been published in major magazines and has written three books -- the University of Nevada, Las Vegas art professor's wealth improved dramatically today with the announcement that he is one of 23 recipients of the coveted MacArthur Fellowship. It includes a no-strings-attached $500,000 award over five years.

"The money will allow me to buy some time -- take a few more naps, read a few more books, gather my thoughts and write a little longer, which is something I have not always had time to do," said Hickey, who at 62 is the oldest of this year's MacArthur Fellows.

Hickey said he still will get up four or five days a week at 3 a.m. and write for six hours, but he doesn't know whether he will keep teaching at UNLV, which takes up a good portion of time he could be resting, writing or smoking, a passion of his.

"Writing is not too arduous, but I have been a freelance writer practically my whole life, so I remember what it was like to not write on a particular day and worry if I would have an income eight weeks later." Hickey said. "I am working on a couple of books now, but I am basically without ambition."

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation gives the fellowships annually to allow recipients to focus on their creative pursuits. No accounting of the money or report on the years' work is required. The fellowship cannot be applied for; a group of selected nominators suggests potential recipients.

Recipients have included writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers and activists. They can either continue work in their fields or change career directions.

The foundation said of Hickey: "His free-spirited and occasionally irreverent musings reflect his passion for the wonders of artistic expression and his disdain for those who obscure it. ... His wisdom and unusual viewpoints provide fresh and provocative counterpoints to the traditional world of art criticism."

Nowhere is that more evident than in Hickey's second book of essays, "Air Guitar: Essays in Art and Democracy" (1997), in which he lashes out against the notion that art "is good for us."

In a 1997 Sun story, Hickey called that theory a "fund-raising ploy used to justify public investments in art." By dismissing the notion, Hickey said, artists are freed from a hypocritical burden of being virtuous, allowing them to create art without worrying about the approval of museums and their patrons.

For such frank teachings, Hickey's students, some of whom have become renowned artists, are grateful.

"He is a very liberating teacher, allowing you to figure things out for yourself," said Tim Bavington, a 1999 UNLV graduate who studied for three years under Hickey and recently received critical acclaim at a showing of his abstract acrylic works in New York City. "He does not give you hard, set rules by which you have to proceed."

Yek, another acclaimed artist who has had successful showings of his abstract acrylic works in Los Angeles, New York, Dallas and Columbus, Ohio, said Hickey's support was a key to his success.

"He taught me how to be a real person in the real world," Yek, a 1997 UNLV graduate, said. "He taught students how to deal with curators and others in the art bureaucracy. He is my friend as well as my mentor, and I am happy he has received this honor, because it is well deserved."

Hickey received his bachelor's degree from Texas Christian University in 1961 and his master's from the University of Texas at Austin. In the 1970s, Hickey, the son of a jazz musician, was a rock guitarist who wrote for Dr. Hook and owned an art gallery in Texas. He later ran an art gallery in New York.

Hickey has been a professor of art theory and criticism at UNLV since 1992 and is considered an expert on Western culture. He has been a visiting professor at Rice and Harvard and in 1993 penned his first collection of essays "The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty."

That year, he also won the College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism. He is a 1969 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and last year he received the Nevada Arts in Education Award.

"Good art is what people will take risks on behalf of to invest in," he said. "Bad art is art you don't notice. There's a lot of ugly art that is good art, because you notice it and you have to come to terms with it."