Dave Hickey PLANS ARE REVEALED: CURATOR DAVE HICKEY ON SITE SANTA FE'S FOURTH INTERNATIONAL BIENNIAL BEAU MONDE: TOWARD A REDEEMED COSMOPOLITANISM

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA - Plans are well underway for SITE Santa Fe's Fourth International Biennial BEAU MONDE: TOWARD A REDEEMED COSMOPOLITANISM, which opens July 14, 2001 and features Dave Hickey as curator. With a fresh curatorial approach, Dave Hickey is planning a non traditional SITE Santa Fe biennial exhibition. Hickey writes,

For the SITE Santa Fe 2001 Biennial, I plan to mount an exhibition entitled BEAU MONDE: TOWARD A REDEEMED COSMOPOLITANISM. I begin this project without any preconceived notion of what a beau monde, or a "beautiful world," might be, only with a confirmed confidence that most artists have their own ideas about it--their own vision of how a beau monde might look--and that this vision is somehow embodied in their work. My task in mounting this exhibition will be to create a confluence of such concrete visions--a melting pot in which nothing melts, in which works of art from around the world, experienced in relation to one another in a space designed for them, will invest the elusive idea of a beau monde with new specificity and complexity, new meaning and resonance. With the aid of Graft Design (a Los Angeles-based design firm, and the first artist group to be signed on to participate in BEAU MONDE: TOWARD A REDEEMED COSMOPOLITANISM), I plan to design a complex, coherent exhibition hall composed of interlocking spaces that are physically (not iconographically) evocative of various regional cultural milieus (Mediterranean, Japanese, Western American, Northern European, etc.), then install within them singular works of art, which celebrate the global field of overlapping and interfused idiomatic expressionÑthe virtuoso accommodation of one cultural idiom to another that constitutes the very definition of cosmopolitanism.

Dave Hickey is a freelance writer of fiction and cultural criticism. He is professor of Art Criticism and Theory at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and contributing editor toArt Issues magazine in Los Angeles. He has served as owner/director of A Clean Well-Lighted Place gallery in Austin, Texas; as director of the Reese Palley Gallery in New York City; as executive editor of Art in America; and as contributing editor to The Village Voice. Mr. Hickey has written for major publications including Rolling Stone, Art News, Art in America, Artforum, Interview, Harper's Magazine, Vanity Fair, Nest, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times.

Dave Hickey's critical essays on art have been collected in two volumes published by Art Issues Press. The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1993) is in its sixth printing, and Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy(1998) is now in its third printing. Both books of essays have had a significant impact on contemporary art criticism. Dave Hickey's latest book, Stardumb, featuring stories by Hickey and artwork by John de Fazio, was published in 1999 by Artspace Books, San Francisco.

Lecturing extensively at universities and art institutions, Dave Hickey has an international reputation as an art personality and writer. He has been the subject of profiles in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, U.S. News and World Report, Texas Monthly, and other publications. Interviews with Hickey have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Bomb, New Art Examiner, and other newspapers and journals, and have been presented on PBS television and National Public Radio stations.

Dave Hickey most recently curatedUltralounge: The Return of Social Space (with Cocktails). The exhibition featured the works of eleven young Las Vegas and Los Angeles-based artists. Organized by, and held at DiverseWorks Artspace in Houston, Texas in 1998, the successful Ultralounge traveled to The University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, Florida, and was on exhibit January 14 – March 3, 2000.