But I know what I don’t like.

I do like to get a good dose of an uninterrupted public radio program occasionally as I drive down to St. George. They’re usually interesting and thought provoking. I had that experience recently as I listened to an interview with Dave Hickey, Art Critic, Essayist and Author and Libby Lumpkin, former Executive Director of the Las Vegas Art Museum. Hickey has made a career of being the outraged and angry artist. OK … Basically, he’s rude, crude and socially unfit. And I say that as someone who often uses the same methodology. But Hickey is really good at it.

Hickey and Lumpkin are outraged and angry now because they’re surrounded by intellectual midgets in Las Vegas. They spent an hour on the State of Nevada show at KNPR radio dropping bombs on various targets of opportunity to demonstrate their outrage. For example,

• Hickey blamed “the Mormon sphere” for the lack of cultural refinement in Las Vegas.
• He described the Art Department at the University of Nevada Las Vegas as an “art factory” and said they weren’t particularly interested in art.
• He called the level of intellect in Las Vegas “low-level” and compared it with Des Moines, Billings, and Omaha.

Hey! I think Omaha has a lot going for it. That’s where Warren Buffett, the greatest financial mind of our time, makes his modest home.

In brief, Hickey and Lumpkin were unanimous in their conviction that they knew what great art was and others didn’t. In particular, Hickey’s enemies at the UNLV Art department are idiots and have no art sense at all. Evidently, he used to be on that faculty and left. Now, Hickey draws down a public paycheck at the UNLV English department. He didn’t have anything bad to say about them.

The core of their outrage seemed to be that Las Vegas isn’t spending enough public money on ‘art’. The public teat that Lumpkin previously sucked from, the Las Vegas Art Museum, was forced to shut its doors due to a lack of money. Lumpkin moaned out loud, “Right now, there’s not a single institution that can take a gift and can properly care for it and maintain it and surround it with the kind of intellectual endeavors that’s required for a public gift of that sort.”

“Care and maintenance” includes hiring people with superior taste like Ms. Lumpkin, one would presume.

Hickey moaned that the Art department at UNLV was lower class because they hire second rate people. He said their hiring philosopy amounted to, “Let’s give my friend from Alaska a job.”

Hmmmm … Hickey moved to Las Vegas from Texas and they gave him a job. For a while, anyway.

How can those ingrates in Las Vegas fail to see the intellectual superiority of these two?

I’ve invested a bit of my time touring art museums in America and Europe such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Kröller-Müller art museum in Otterlo, Netherlands. I clearly remember standing in front of stack of rusting oil drums – Really! That’s all it was! – at Kröller-Müller that was reverently considered to be “great art” … by somebody anyway.

Here’s an idea. Might it be possible that what Hickey and Lumpkin call “art” is actually more accurately described as “decoration” or “entertainment”? That maybe even the word “art” is part of a vast scam to extract money from people. And that maybe the concept of “democracy” works here too? My vote is equal to your vote at the polling place. Maybe my taste in decoration and entertainment is equal to yours too?

And maybe public dollars spent to cater to any individual’s idea of “art” are dollars mispent. Ya think??