![]() ![]() Now, it seems, that lost generosity, like Banquo's ghost, is doomed to haunt our discourse about contemporary art-no longer required to recommend images to our attention or to insinuate them into the vernacular-and no longer even welcome to try. The art critic Dave Hickey, for instance, began his brilliant little book The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty with a description of the ills of the academic art world and the potential balm to be found in pleasure and beauty:įor more than four centuries, the idea of "making it beautiful" has been the keystone of our cultural vernacular-the lover's machine-gun and the prisoner's joy-the last redoubt of the disenfranchised and the single direct route from the image to the individual without a detour through church or state. I think that all of these shifts in critical taste were present in writings about music, but they also covered a lot more ground. The timing matters for a several reasons-a vaguely discernible 20-year cycle of rubbishing and rehabilitation in much post-War popular culture, for instance, discussed further below the generational and technological shifts that enabled the appearance of a broader range of values and investments amongst critics, whether professional, amateur, or somewhere in between or for that matter, a gradual shift in academic writing about popular music from a largely defensive, morally and aesthetically engagé style of scholarship to one more willing to give itself up to enjoyment. I first began looking for ways to write about the artists discussed in this book in the late 1990s, a far over a decade ago.
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