Dave Hickey is a freelance writer of fiction and cultural criticism, curator, and lecturer who has been affiliated with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas since 1992. He has served as owner-director of A Clean Well-Lighted Place gallery in Austin, Texas, as director of the Reese Palley Gallery in New York City, as Executive Editor of Art in America magazine in New York City, and as Contributing Editor to The Village Voice. He has written for most major American cultural publications including The Rolling Stone, Art News, Art in America, Artforum, Interview, Harper's Magazine, Vanity Fair, Nest, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times. Hickey received a B.A. (1961) from Texas Christian University and an M.A. (1963) from the University of Texas at Austin. He served as curator for SITE Santa Fe's Fourth International Biennial, "Beau Monde: Toward a Redeemed Cosmopolitanism" (July 2001 - January 2002). Hickey has been a visiting professor at numerous institutions, including Harvard University, Rice University, and the Otis Parsons Institute, Los Angeles. His critical essays on art have been collected in two volumes: The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1993) and Air Guitar: Essays in Art and Democracy (1997). Hickey is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1969) and the College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art or Architectural Criticism (1993). In 2001, he was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship grant.