25 Women: Essays on Their Art

New
Illustrated
2015
$27.29

Newsweek calls him exhilarating and deeply engaging. Time Out New York calls him smart, provocative, and a great writer. Critic Peter Schjeldahl, meanwhile, simply calls him My hero. There's no one in the art world quite like Dave Hickey-and a new book of his writing is an event. 25 Women will not disappoint. The book collects Hickey's best and most important writing about female artists from the past twenty years. But this is far more than a compilation: Hickey has revised each essay, bringing them up to date and drawing out common themes. Written in Hickey's trademark style-accessible, witty, and powerfully illuminating-25 Women analyzes the work of Joan Mitchell, Bridget Riley, Fiona Rae, Lynda Benglis, Karen Carson, and many others. Hickey discusses their work as work, bringing politics and gender into the discussion only where it seems warranted by the art itself. The resulting book is not only a deep engagement with some of the most influential and innovative contemporary artists, but also a reflection on the life and role of the critic: the decisions, judgments, politics, and ethics that critics negotiate throughout their careers in the art world. Always engaging, often controversial, and never dull, Dave Hickey is a writer who gets people excited-and talking-about art. 25 Women will thrill his many fans, and make him plenty of new ones.

Synopsis

Newsweek calls him exhilarating and deeply engaging. Time Out New York calls him smart, provocative, and a great writer. Critic Peter Schjeldahl, meanwhile, simply calls him My hero. There's no one in the art world quite like Dave Hickey-and a new book of his writing is an event. 25 Women will not disappoint. The book collects Hickey's best and most important writing about female artists from the past twenty years. But this is far more than a compilation: Hickey has revised each essay, bringing them up to date and drawing out common themes. Written in Hickey's trademark style-accessible, witty, and powerfully illuminating-25 Women analyzes the work of Joan Mitchell, Bridget Riley, Fiona Rae, Lynda Benglis, Karen Carson, and many others. Hickey discusses their work as work, bringing politics and gender into the discussion only where it seems warranted by the art itself. The resulting book is not only a deep engagement with some of the most influential and innovative contemporary artists, but also a reflection on the life and role of the critic: the decisions, judgments, politics, and ethics that critics negotiate throughout their careers in the art world. Always engaging, often controversial, and never dull, Dave Hickey is a writer who gets people excited-and talking-about art. 25 Women will thrill his many fans, and make him plenty of new ones.

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More Information

Format: Illustrated
Pages: 192
Edition: Illustrated
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 22 Dec 2015
ISBN 10: 0226333159
ISBN 13: 9780226333151

Media Reviews

Dave Hickey is not lacking in chutzpah; he has, after all, on occasion been referred to as the bad boy of art criticism.
25 Women resembles an unfettered, if highly enriching, dump of Hickey's free-associative musings . The text zooms from anecdotes about Hickey's youth in the cattle yards of Texas, to his time spent hobnobbing with the likes of Andy Warhol in New York, to a meta description of the home office in which he is writing. We get a similarly panoptic run at the various female subjects, including personal biography, cultural context, and fictitious narratives meant to elucidate deeper truths about their art.
For Hickey, art is not a dead object to be seen and dryly interpreted; rather the act of viewing art creates its own meaning. Again and again, he describes the process of confronting a piece of art that resists him and then feeling a blurring of boundaries between himself and the work, something akin to a momentary out-of-body experience. --Caitlin Smith Rimschnick Bookslut
One of the most interesting books anyone has ever written about women artists. There is no bogus effort to find strained 'commonalities' or 'shared sensibilities.' Each artist is absolutely 'complete' in and of herself. There is stunning and polymathic erudition, connoisseurship and theoretical nous here, but one must also cherish the book for the endless, morphing, sparking, sparkling ideas taking shape on every page. It's as if someone were setting off exciting little squibs in almost every sentence--fun for sure, but often with an extraordinary pay-off: so many of them blossom into huge beautiful fireworks that then proceed to hang up there in the sky. The charmed voice never wearies or disappoints. --Terry Castle
Dave Hickey is not lacking in chutzpah; he has, after all, on occasion been referred to as the 'bad boy' of art criticism.
25 Women resembles an unfettered, if highly enriching, dump of Hickey's free-associative musings.... The text zooms from anecdotes about Hickey's youth in the cattle yards of Texas, to his time spent hobnobbing with the likes of Andy Warhol in New York, to a meta description of the home office in which he is writing. We get a similarly panoptic run at the various female subjects, including personal biography, cultural context, and fictitious narratives meant to elucidate deeper truths about their art.
For Hickey, art is not a dead object to be seen and dryly interpreted; rather the act of viewing art creates its own meaning. Again and again, he describes the process of confronting a piece of art that resists him and then feeling a blurring of boundaries between himself and the work, something akin to a momentary out-of-body experience. --Caitlin Smith Rimschnick Bookslut

Author Bio

Dave Hickey is former executive editor of Art in America and the author of The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty and Air Guitar. He has served as a contributing editor for the Village Voice and as the arts editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.