Dave Hickey "The Good Ennui" at SVA Part I:

I made a point of being in the audience for Dave Hickey’s latest lecture at the School of Visual Arts. I love Hickey and try to see all his local appearances. After video recording most of the talk, editing it and posting it at my facebook page I spent the next evening watching the Coen Brother’s “No Country for Old Men”. It dawned on me that despite Hickey’s ultra coolness, there’s a shared appeal between himself and Tommy Lee Jones’ grizzled Sheriff Ed Tom Bell.

Dave Hickey "The Good Ennui" Part II:

Hickey lamented the fact that there are “way too many artists these days”, and seemed to look at the failure of these people as akin to being stalked by the killing machine Anton Chigurh. Both Hickey and Sheriff Bell are Texans, and even for the most cosmopolitan Downtown hipster, there’s an irresistible attraction to the classic plain spoken American cowboy. In closing Hickey admitted that, like the Sheriff, art and the world are moving too fast for an old man to keep up with, that things had changed, that he was out matched, that the market had become vicious. Funny how even New York’s black clad cultural cognoscenti still want to sit around the campfire and listen to the old-timers.