CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/4/2023

A new, expanded edition of Dave Hickey's landmark 'Invisible Dragon'

Featured spreads are from the new, expanded and clothbound thirtieth-anniversary edition of Dave Hickey’s game-changing essay collection, The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty and Other Matters—out now and selling like hotcakes from original publisher Art Issues Press. In his foreword, editor and publisher Gary Kornblau situates the book, now and then. “1993: The plague of AIDS rages through yet another decade. I come into my own amid the terror and tristesse. Dave Hickey finds himself ensconsed in Las Vegas, Nevada, where he is resuscitating a tattered life and career. He sits down to rewrite a few ‘fugitive critiques,’ and we design a divertimento, The Invisible Dragon. To the surprise of both of us, the book ignites a firestorm, and from its ashes ‘beauty’ arises as a dominant force in artistic life. Academics argue about theoretical minutiae. Artists pass the book around like a samizdat. … [Here] I intersperse orphaned texts among Dragon’s essays on beauty to create an alternative narrative. In the afterword, I recall the brash, heterosexual author and me as the most unlikely of queer pals. (I ‘queer’ Hickey, in the argot of the day.) I situate the meanings of Dragon within the trauma of the AIDS plague, where the book first found its footing. For me—even more so as I age—Dragon makes beauty visible under the looming presence of death and bodily decay. I remix and embed unapologetically to keep Hickey’s renegade spirit alive. I pirate his book on beauty, as Hickey pirated beauty himself.”