Customer Reviews

The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, Revised and Expanded

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The old edition of this book had been out of print long enough that it's started to become a serious collector's item, and rightfully so. These essays are charged with ideas that provoke conversation wherever and whenever they are dropped amidst artists and art critics. Do the come off sometimes as a little bit too confrontational? Is there a little bit too much of a twisting of the undergarments by Hickey, just for the fun of it sometimes? Of course. However, despite occasional lapses into mediocre sophomoric twitterings, there remains some substantial, serious thought throughout that is undeniable worth time and consideration.

As a graduate student I poured over these essays originally bound in a tattered soft cover I found at an obscure used book store. Years later, I'm still a fan of Hickey's cowboy-like mentality, wit and contemporary vernacular (most prevalent in "Air Guitar"). With my copy beyond repair, a few years ago I even contacted Art Issues Press in hopes for a copy and learned that a new edition was in the works. (They still sent me a nice clean photo-copy of the original.) This "revised and expanded" edition has reignited a lively debate amongst my peers and colleagues regarding the art market, the concept of beauty, and, of course, the sublime. This book belongs on the shelf of everyone associated with the arts.

This short book of essays is essential reading in modern art and cultural criticism -- alternately illuminating and infuriating. It will get you thinking, seriously, in ways you haven't thought before -- and what more do we want from a critic? You will never consider "beauty" in quite the same way again.

'This playful little collection supposedly invoked the ire of the art establishment. I found it pretty pretty tame, except he comes down on the museums and curators for pandering to the marketeers...or being in collusion...he's not really sure. (I give him extra points for being a Mapplethorpe fan.) His vocabulary is interesting and the writing unique.

This collection of Hickey's essays blew my mind wide open. The content is most appropriate for those who are under the impression that they have a firm idea of the place of beauty and meaning in contemporary art. The concepts that were explicated over the course of these five essays introduced cracks in just the right places in my theories of art to allow Hickey to drop sticks of dynamite down into their cores. Read every word with the care required of one handling a nuclear weapon.

One of my favorite collections of essays on art. I read this first as an undergrad. The ideas have stuck with me over the years and now as a graduate some ten years later I am again drawn to Hickey's unique insights. This is not indicative of most of Hickey's writings, these essays lack the humor and light-heartedness of some of his other books. Even so, The Invisible Dragon has a gravity all its own. Of Hickey's writing this book remains, by far, my favorite.

This revised and expanded edition of the classic book, "The Invisible Dragon," lovingly designed and produced by the University of Chicago Press, is terrific--and even better than the first edition. A new essay on "American Beauty" proposes an aesthetics uniquely American, devolving from the Founders and thrown horribly off track by the commodity politics of the nineties, and especially of post 9/11. A new introduction by Hickey rounds out the offerings, making Invisible Dragon a great book for the new millennium.

This little book was in overall excellent condition, save for around 10 pages underlined in pencil and one page in pen. This seemed at odds with the book description, so I was a bit disappointed, but only a bit.