Join SMoCA and former ASU art history professor Julia Friedman for an evening dedicated to exploring the intersection of art criticism and social media. Dr. Friedman will present her two new publications—Wasted Words: The Essential Dave Hickey Online Compilation and Dust Bunnies: Dave Hickey’s Online Aphorisms—the results of her most recent project based on the digital writings of the MacArthur laureate art critic Dave Hickey.

Those who would like to have their copies signed can either pre-purchase them or purchase them after the lecture (while supplies last).

Between June 2014 and April 2015, Dave Hickey posted almost 3,000 digital comments on social media, prompting nearly 700,000 words in response from art lovers, acolytes, and skeptics. Wasted Words is an unedited comprehensive transcript of these exchanges. This digital discourse reveals the range of Hickey’s strong opinions, as he embarks on a crypto-enlightenment project for the benefit of “dunces” and “pricks.”

Dustbunnies is an assemblage of “swept up” fragments that came from the same, vast digital discourse, distilling Hickey’s richly aphoristic comments, extracted from various discussion threads. Unlike Wasted Words, which is inherently contextual and discursive, Dustbunnies stresses the timeless character of Hickey’s unique authorial voice. Always provocative and often shocking, Hickey’s pronouncements are perfectly suited for the jab-like nature of the social media platform.

Julia Friedman is a Los Angeles based Russian-born art historian, writer and curator. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from Brown University in 2005, and has since researched and taught in the US, UK and Japan. Her trans-disciplinary work on European Modernism, Russian emigration and book art resulted in the illustrated monograph Beyond Symbolism and Surrealism: Alexei Remizov’s Synthetic Art published by Northwestern University Press in January 2011. She has been a contributor to Artforum, and has a blog column in The Huffington Post. She is currently working on a monograph about Wally Hedrick (1928–2003). 

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