Dave Hickey: The Invisible Dragon

Dave Hickey's work titled The Invisible Dragon has truly ignited a debate about beauty within art as he calls for all readers to reconsider beauty and to reconsider the nature of art itself. Hickey's purpose of his writing is to move people to see that beauty as a means and not an end is what makes art powerful, what makes it interesting. Hickey explains how many people, specifically in most traditional views, have believed that art should sell itself through beauty, for if it sells it is commodity, but if it sells something other than itself it is advertisement. He also shares that he has found that art dealers only care about "how it looks" while new instituationally employed art professionals "really care about what it means". I agree with Hickey that this is what is truly more important, not to mention what is becoming more and more preferred in contemporary art forms. People don't just want to look at something beautiful, but to look at something that may first be confusing or scary or abstract and be able to draw something out of it: a realization, an emotion, an idea. This is what makes art beautiful, the fact that it is so much more than an inatimate object, but something that can provoke a movement in each and every eye that does not just look at it, but truly sees it.