Dave Hickey from the University of Nevada in Las Vegas gave a lecture called “Custodians of culture- Schoolyard Art: Playing Fair Without the Referee”. The lecture was mainly about selling without selling out focusing on how sites of commerce have evolved from the white cube to the art fair. Hickey begins his lecture by describing Dr. J, a guy who wanted to play professional basketball and always played by the rules, even if he was playing street ball. On the other hand, in the art world, Hickey said “whatever rules there were, there ain’t”. in today’s world, artists like money more than they like art. The act of honorability does not exist in the art world anymore. Hickey argues that if you behave well, if you behave right, all you can lose is money. To be honest, that’s all you can lose by being right, by being correct and by making art that might last you 100 years.

Hickey questions why people would want art that they don’t really like. Hickey quotes Leo by saying, “you can’t be right all the time, but you can never be wrong”, which means that if you create art for yourself and if you buy art because you like it, there is nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is selling art for too much money. Hickey claims that institutions suck all the money. The whole format of the art world changed since the 1970’s. You had artists in their studios who took their work to art galleries, where members of the community would buy what they liked. If community members bought the art it meant it had virtue, and it represented icons of public significance. The sequences of art reaching a museum was artist, dealer, community, and lastly museum. It reached the museum depending on the interest of the community.

Dave Hickey then discusses the idea of a price point. Leo Catelli is an example of a price point; he did not compromise his art. Price point people are never wrong, but who can give you a price point now, who makes a profession out of never being wrong. The answer to this is no one because this world does not exist in art anymore. In institutional installation markets nothing changes because nothing is driving a change and he claims that we don’t care. We don’t have style development anymore because history is over. 9/11 marked the death of post modernism. Hickey loves it when people buy art, but he will only show art he likes. He even likes art that he feels is 99% bullshit and 1% interesting because that 1% is all he needs.

Hickeys wife commented on a recent movie that they just saw claiming that she liked it because it had good values. Dave Hickey questions if value will ever return to the art world. He feels that it could be coming back and that people might start to buy again what they like, not what costs the most. I hope that good value will be reentered into the art world because art is a form of expression and should be created and bought because it expresses ones interest.