People who show up

I've been checking out Dave Hickey's essay collection Air Guitar. He's an art critic who also does and writes about music, hence the title, although it's a bit misleading--air guitar is his derogatory analogy for the act of writing criticism. It's been teaching me a great deal of new vocabulary words, which is great, but also the book is worth its price only for "Romancing the Looky-Loos," which is an essay that I feel like nailing to a bunch of doors. It's about the difference between spectators and participants, those who just happen across the concert versus those who are truly engaged. Spectators, or "civilians," were "people who did not live the life--people with no real passion for what was going on. They were just looking." (148)

Listen to this. "The butterfly effects of cultural eccentricity are of no interest to spectators; they either consume, or they critique...Beyond this hegemony of corporate and institutional consensus, however, beyond the purview of uncannily lifelike blockbusters like Jurassic Park and the Whitney Biennial, everything that grows in the domain of culture, that acquires constituencies and enters the realm of public esteem, does so through the accumulation of participatory investment by people who show up." (150)

The most enthralling thing about this book has been Hickey's conception of cultural levels--there is the controlling class, which consists, interestingly, of both academia and the corporate tastemakers, and then there is this vast underbelly of actual people at actual bars making actual art/music/whatever and actually talking about it. Art coming into existence through real-life, quotidian socialization. Hickey entered this level by dropping out of graduate school and opening an art gallery (in Austin, of course), and the ideas he's developed through the experience of dealing with art from commercial, academic, and critical vantages are deep and always surprising. Each essay begins with something and then goes somewhere different and more insightful than you expect it to. He also really knows how to write.