Thomas Mann in Dr Faustus (p61 Penguin 1978) spoke of ‘cult epochs and cultural epochs’. He said (or he has one of his characters say)  ‘for a cultural epoch, there seems to be a spot too much talk about culture in ours don’t you think?’.

Hickey might pretend to agree. But he’s a culture snob that sets himself up as an anti-snob. Of Foucaults acid experiment he says ‘Too late! Too Euro, too Castaneda. Bad place, wrong music. Yikes!’ He ridicules spectators as ‘looky-loos’ whilst proudly nailing his impeccable connoisseur credentials to the mast. His account of meeting a group of artists in SF who he says only mixed with other artists does not read authentically. I suggest he made the conversation up. Its fake news.

He even has the arrogance to place himself inside the head of Hank Williams and in one unintentionally hilarious moment, gives himself a credit for getting Parliament Funkadelic signed to a major label.

His anti-expert, anti-academic diatribes are Trumpian. As is his paranoid-libertarian dislike of the NEA as state sponsored art. He’s a free market neo-liberal disguised as an anti-elitist, ground-up democrat.

His style is cod-gonzo sub-Kerouac. It made me feel uneasy and uninspired.

Apart from that it’s ok. In fact he might agree with Mann when he says

‘I’d like to know if epochs that possessed culture knew the word at all…Our state is that of civilisation- a very praiseworthy state, no doubt, but…we should have to become very much more barbaric to be capable of culture again’. He defines the current civilisation as possessing ‘technique and comfort’ and ‘in that state one talks about culture but one does not have it’.

He is writing in 1943 about the early 1900’s. It brings to mind the contemporary phenomenon of artists making art about art and a certain obsession with definition of terms.