“Dave Hickey’s writing is an atomic bomb of wild styling, brilliant insight, philosophical leaps of a visionary imagination, and astral projections of sixth-sense taste. A perfect combination of Billy the Kid, Waylon Jennings, and Oscar Wilde.” —Jerry Saltz “As a writer, Dave is a deep stylist, one of the best in the language. He uses style to tell truths otherwise inaccessible. You can’t separate his meaning from the timbre of his prose, whose repertoire includes plain American (which dogs and cats can understand, as Marianne Moore noted), philosophical precision, polemical scorched earth, and defrocked scholarly mandarin. His arguments are places of the heart: bright pastures or dark alleys where you are accompanied by a voice explaining things you suddenly feel you always knew.” —Peter Schjeldahl “Feint of Heart, what a substantial necessary collection. It’s too big to slip inside the breast pocket of your jacket, where it could deflect a bullet and save your life, if art sustains you the way it did Dave Hickey. But locate it there anyway, right next to your heart where it should be. This thorough and generous book is a glory.” —Meeka Walsh, editor of Border Crossings and author of Malleable Forms: Selected Essays "Dave Hickey is your friend. A really smart friend who sees everything for what it is, knows right from wrong, is kind and funny, and never looks down on people. If you are a writer, it’s okay to hate him just a little bit because, damn, those sentences." —Paul Chaat Smith, author of Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong From the legendary and iconoclastic critic Dave Hickey, a collection of twenty of his most emblematic essays on art “We really don’t need to know the aesthetic and moral parameters of a work to love it—only to know they are there.” —Dave Hickey The late Dave Hickey was a singular voice on art, music, democracy, an