Oh Dave Hickey, you are such a show-off. This book of yours is part art-criticism, part you waxing about your life and the particular time/place variants of the world you happened to inhabit. You have lots to say on certain subjects, always drawing parallels between them and academia. I admire your egocentrism, even more your anti-intellectualism, but for all your creative similitudes, I have to say the margins of your scope are narrow. Because you speak only from experience, refusing to base conclusions on any but the rawest evidence, your points are obscure, the theses of your essays vague. Forgive my poor faith, but GW Bush uses the same "speaking from experience" method to point his audience where he wants them to go. You end your chapters abruptly, as if you suddenly got bored of hearing yourself think. And who doesn't tire of self-congratulation after a while?

So then you turn to congratulate the "greats" you emulate, and, no surprise, they are largely white dudes like yourself, with hardly a woman among them. In effect, your writing speaks to a profound ignorance about all things outside your realm of experience, meaning what you say is not true at all for some people, while many are in danger of adopting it as truth.

Not until the chapter "Frivolity and Unction" do you finally redeam yourself, saying what I've been thinking the entire time I've been reading this book, nay taking this class: "Why don't all of us art-types summon up the moral courage to admit that what we do has no intrinsic value or virtue- that it has its moments and it has its functions, but otherwise, all things considered....it is a bad, silly, frivolous thing to do?"(202)

I thank you for saying that, David Hichey, and I hope the cloistered art-school monks of the world take it to heart.