Far from Respectable is a worthy introduction to
the writing of a major American critic and should instill a desire to experience Hickey’s
delights firsthand.
— Washington Post
Oppenheimer has written a poetic distillation of Hickey's art in America, the broken
cowboy, and the cowering broker...In going back to the author's initial two questions: Is Dave
Hickey worth the hype, and should anyone give a hoot? Far From Respectable,
like the wandering iconoclast it follows, deserves nothing but respect.
— Austin
Chronicle
[Far from Respectable
is] neither a biography, a cultural history, nor a sustained assessment, although it has
elements of each. It also features reporting and literary criticism, as well as autobiographical
elements. Oppenheimer employs these materials as a dioramist might, reconstructing a few
specific periods—Nashville in the 1970s, the culture wars of the 1990s—to illuminate his thesis:
that much of Hickey’s writing transcends criticism to approach the status of art.
—
Alta Journal
Far from
Respectable is the first book about Hickey,...but it won’t be the last. Any book in
which one author writes about another writer can quickly sour into a competition between the
subject’s writing and the author’s writing about it. Oppenheimer spares readers—and himself—such
indignities, bringing clear-eyed insights and a straightforward voice to his explorations and
explanations of Hickey’s life and work...If there will be many more books about Hickey and his
philosophy of beauty, then they’ll have to be very good to get over the high bar that
Oppenheimer sets.
— Burnaway
Oppenheimer...is a skilled biographer. He is unusually sensitive to the winding paths
by which our private pleasures shape, resist, mar, and undo our public political and moral
commitments...As he recounts his subject’s life and contemporary relevance, Oppenheimer stages
his own enjoyment of Hickey with such lucid warmth that he seems to substantiate Hickey’s
insistence that our enjoyment of art entangles us in other human loves...Far From Respectable
succeeds in proving, through its reader’s own pleasure, the truth of Hickey’s vision of art as
an experience that opens the self toward others.
— Tablet Magazine
[An] engaging study of the idiosyncratic critic…[Oppenheimer]
combines gumshoe reporting, interviews with figures in Hickey’s life, as well as plenty of fan
service nuggets, and the result is a short book that both humanizes Hickey and burnishes the
mystique.
— Full Stop
Framed as a
twilight reappraisal of Hickey’s life and work, [Far from Respectable's] main
task is to pull Hickey’s criticism from its pigeonhole in the art world of the 1990s and into
wilder, thornier, more human thickets of desire...while he praises Hickey’s writings as art,
Oppenheimer also asks the pertinent question: is Hickey’s criticism still relevant? This is
where the book gets relevant too...Engaging with beauty makes our lives richer—if it does
anything at all—and Oppenheimer finds Hickey beautiful...there are moments when the whole thing
sings.
— Art in America
Far
From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art is definitive...The book delivers
insightful, detailed overviews of Hickey’s biography—from boyhood in post-war Texas, to NYC
gallerist, to premiere art critic and cultural provocateur—and his career highlights: written,
lauded, vilified...[Oppenheimer's] work is smart and lovely, and in service to his
groundbreaking subject, while keeping readers in mind. The biographer understands art, theory,
culture, craft, and Hickey, and, importantly, doesn’t punish us when we don’t. (Which is
often.)
— Southwest Review
Oppenheimer
neatly dissects Hickey’s argument that defending provocative art against censorship by shouting
'free speech' misses the point: It’s the power of the artwork, or its 'beauty,' that should be
defended because that’s what got the censors so riled up in the first place...In encouraging us
to defend our loves—and by doing it himself—Hickey, along with Oppenheimer, defend our fragile,
and increasingly illiberal, democracy. Hickey couldn’t be more relevant than that.
—
KNPR's "Fifth Street"
Dave Hickey's lifetime of
stops and starts, 'three fourths of a disaster,' produced a brambly, bubbly body of work that
ranges from Flaubert to Liberace and from Hank Williams to Michelangelo. It's the kind of legacy
that demands an explanation, and Daniel Oppenheimer provides a brilliant one. Hickey is
beautiful—and so is this book.
— Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of
Sontag: Her Life and Work
The
never-to-be-completed mosaic that is Dave Hickey’s life and work gains some beautifully
hand-crafted tiles from Daniel Oppenheimer. His authorial voice—open, intimate, probing—is the
perfect vehicle for plumbing the depths of Hickey’s overall essentialness. I devoured
it.
— Steven Soderbergh, Academy Award-winning film director
[A] slender but finely crafted and brilliantly sensitive
book...Far from Respectable is a wonderful book that provides the most
eloquent explanation of Hickey you’ll ever have the pleasure to read.
— The
University Bookman
Penetrating the ruse of his
subject’s impish provocations, and fully understanding the power of critical thought,
Oppenheimer builds a solid argument for revisiting Hickey’s books—not only because they contain
some of the best-ever Anglophone writing on art, but also because we badly need Hickey’s
evaluation of the 1990s to help us survive the culture of the 2020s...Far From
Respectable makes an excellent case for reading Dave Hickey again.
—
Athenaeum Review
[An] admiring but even-handed
critical biography.
— ArtReview
[Far from Respectable] offers a coherent trajectory of a writer,
from the childhood tragedy, to his lost years of drug use among the Nashville’s outlaw singers,
to later-life prominence and tenure in Las Vegas (the town that best suited Hickey’s
free-spirited nature). Above all, it has the salutary effect of reminding us of Hickey as an
artist; instead of a gadfly, Hickey might be seen as a critical object himself, with a body of
work worth experiencing.
— The Nation
[Dave Hickey's] writings are a contentious takedown of the art establishment and they
encourage us to rethink out relationship to beauty. [Far from Respectable]
traces the history of this unique mind and his impact on art and writing.
—
Artnet
[Oppenheimer] makes a solid case for why we
need to read and reread Hickey now: not only did he produce some of the best English-language
essays on art and culture of the last century, but in our times those writings have proved
themselves more prescient than ever.
— The New Criterion
[A] loving biography of the late critic.
— Fort Worth
Weekly
In Far From Respectable: Dave
Hickey and His Art, Daniel Oppenheimer complicates the cartoon version of [Hickey's]
life that continues to shadow his reputation as a writer.
— New York Review of
Books
