Dust Bunnies: Dave Hickey’s Online Aphorisms

Dust Bunnies 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 March 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.

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 March 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.

Conceived and Produced by LG Williams and The Estate of LG Williams(TM). Edited by Julia Friedman.

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

LG Williams is a Los Angeles-based artist and recently the Endowed University Instructor at The Academy of Art University; Robert Hughes Distinguished Visual Artist-In-Residence at The Lodge in Hollywood, CA; and the Emmy Hennings Distinguished Professor at D(D).DDDD University. LG has exhibited in various national and international venues, including The Internet Pavilion of La Biennale Di Venezia, and has appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Japan Times, Los Angeles Times, La Stampa, Bookforum, Purple Diary, Mousse Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail among others.

Julia Friedman is a Russian-born art historian, writer, and curator.

PCP Press is an independent publisher of avant-garde books and insurgent authors. Founded in 1990 in San Francisco at a time when transgressive and sometimes esoteric international art books had a difficult time making their way into the wider American marketplace, over the past three decades PCP has grown into a consistent publisher of books, special editions and rare publications from an array of the world’s most respected authors and cultural institutions - including Raymond Pettibon, Dave Hickey, Wayne Thiebaud, Bryan Reynolds, David Hawkes, Shepard Fairey, LG Williams, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, and Luscerne Kunstpanorama.

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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.