Event is free, but seating is limited.

Please RSVP to Susan Young at the front desk at 505-989-1199 or young@sitesantafe.org.

Dave Hickey and Julia Friedman present Dave Hickey’s new books Wasted Words: The Essential Dave Hickey Online Compilation and Dustbunnies: Dave Hickey’s Online Aphorisms.

Wasted Words : The Essential Dave Hickey Online Compilation

Compiled by Julia Friedman

Between June 2014 and April 2015, Dave Hickey posted almost 3,000 digital comments on social media, prompting nearly 700,000 words in response from art lovers, acolytes, and skeptics. Wasted Words is an unedited comprehensive transcript of these exchanges. This polyphonic digital discourse reveals the range of Hickey’s strong opinions, as he embarks on a crypto-enlightenment project for the benefit of “dunces” and “pricks.”

Dave Hickey’s digital writings highlight the impact of digital technology on culture, while allowing a more intimate glimpse of their author. These writings reveal the well-known critic in a creative-informal, rather than critical-formal, mode. Not only do they flesh out many of the ideas elucidated in Hickey’s essays on art, but they also cover a variety of topics, including the year 1972, Texas Eagle Scouts, and Hickey’s own academic misadventures.

Dustbunnies: Dave Hickey’s Online Aphorisms

Compiled and edited by Julia Friedman



Dustbunnies is an assemblage of “swept up” fragments that came from a vast digital discourse that took place in Dave Hickey’s social media space between June 2014 and April 2015. During that time Hickey posted almost 3,000 comments, prompting nearly 700,000 words in response from art lovers, acolytes and skeptics. Wasted Words, the resulting volume, is an unedited comprehensive transcript of these exchanges. Its pendant publication, Dustbunnies, distills Hickey’s richly aphoristic comments, extracted from various discussion threads.

Unlike Wasted Words, which is inherently contextual and discursive, Dustbunnies stresses the timeless character of Hickey’s unique authorial voice. Always provocative and often shocking, Hickey’s pronouncements are perfectly suited for the jab-like nature of the social media platform. In a delightfully ironic twist of fate, some two decades after the onset of the digital revolution, a critic known for his paragraph-long verbal riffs blasts away at digital natives in the under-140-character idiom they understand.

Dave Hickey is a distinguished American art and cultural critic and the author of The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1993), Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997), and Pirates and Farmers (2014). His most recent book, 25 Women: Essays on Their Art, is just out from the University of Chicago Press.

Hickey was Professor of English at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, and Distinguished Professor of Criticism for the MFA Program in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of New Mexico.

Julia Friedman is a Russian-born art historian, writer, and curator. Her book Beyond Symbolism and Surrealism: Alexei Remizov’s Synthetic Art was published by Northwestern University Press in 2010. She is currently working on a monograph about the California artist Wally Hedrick.