Feint of Heart: Art Writings, 1982–2002
By Dave Hickey
Published by David Zwirner
New York, 2024

The late art critic Dave Hickey was a true child of the West. Born in Texas in 1938, he opened a short-lived yet influential gallery in Austin (A Clean, Well-Lighted Place), worked as a songwriter in Nashville, wrote about art for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and taught at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. That he spent time in New York as an editor at Art in America felt like an aberration, a detour. He was in thrall to the West’s harsh expansiveness, its earthiness, describing it as “a real poor place” where “things break and don’t get fixed, and people do too.”