Perfect Wave by Dave Hickey

“Unfortunately, the right wing of American culture harbors a deep distrust of this sophistication. It doesn’t think we can be civilized, except through authoritarian police control; it presumes, further, that any disorienting challenge that issues from a work of art is a direct incitement to civil unrest. The American left wing distrusts this same sophistication because this faction doesn’t really want us civilized. It wishes to retain the option of revolutionary violence in the futherance of a ‘culture war’ and consequently retains its war-like rhetoric, disdaining any inference of art’s civilizing meditation. The left wing suspects that art is opium; the right suspects it’s PCP. Neither recognizes it as the conventional, civilized forum that it is. Failing to recognize this, they assume that ordinary citizens are not cognizant of its conventional nature either and thus cannot be trusted to distinguish artifice from actuality, words from deeds, signs from referents, narrative from actions. This is elitist balderdash, yet for the past thirty years, the left and right wings of American culture have urgently conspired to ‘civilize’ art itself. To mitigate art’s ability to civilize us by striving to civilize art itself. They have conspired to limit our freedom to construct new meanings and values for works of art: the right wing by seeking to censor any art that might generate healthy anxiety; the left by explaining away art’s ability to challenge us individually, by presenting art to us in perfectly controlled, explained, and contextualized packages.”

-Dave Hickey, 2017