Even in this revised version, augmented by a new essay that traces the pagan uses of beauty in the West, The Invisible Dragon takes the chansons des gestes as its genre, folding metered rhyme and blocky stanza into luminous prose. Although told in a voice that splits the difference between poststructuralist bookworm and gonzo journalist, while easily surpassing both types, the book’s narrative couldn’t be more traditional and threadbare: a lone outsider, surveying the beautiful things that bloom in his midst, takes a stand against the powerful and evil Order that wants to squash them. The evil Order is the Therapeutic Institution -  “a loose confederation of museums, institutions, bureaus, foundations, publications, and endowments.” (p. 53) It’s agenda: “...it upholds no standards and proposes no secular agendas beyond its soothing assurance that the ‘experience of art,‘ under its politically correct auspices, will be redemptive––an assurance founded on an even deeper faith that ‘art watching‘ is a form of grace that, by its very nature, is good for both our spiritual health and personal growth––regardless and in spite of the crazy shit that individual works may egregiously recommend.” (p. 53) Perhaps a benign agenda that of the Therapeutic Institution in light of the truly horrific schemes of both the Middle Ages and our own times, except for the fact that it impoverishes our understanding of both art objects and what can happen when we stand before them.    

Against the paladins of the Therapeutic Institution, Dave Hickey casts himself as a kind of knowing hidalgo in cowboy boots and a baseball cap, a dog-eared paperback of Coldness and Cruelty stuffed in the back pocket of his washed-out jeans. He strives, against the tide, to keep alive not a world of chivalry but of delirious experience, where desire sets the agenda and all guarantees are off the table. One leaps into the abysses of sex, psychedelics, and intense imagery without legal recourse for the damage that may be done. It’s an unregulated world that unfolds beneath the threshold of protective institutionality––a gambler’s paradise. It’s hardly surprising that Vegas would emerge, in the book that followed this one, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy, as the one faithful contemporary manifestation of this world in which you take the hits because you know the highs are worth it. And the highs, no one needs to tell you this, are what keep habit and resentment from wrapping you in their tendrils and a kind of deadness from settling deep in your step. The highs are not necessarily good for you, they’re just necessary. They elevate us, even when they drag us through the mud.

Beauty, in this world, is the rhetorical device potential highs come dressed in, the drag of pleasure and surprise. Beauty is the mediator that can turn “the crazy shit that individual works may egregiously recommend” into imaginable social and existential options. It can doll up toxic assets, airbrush monsters, polish deviance, and make turds gleam like candy canes. It can do this long enough to seduce us into taking a second and a third look, into bending a little our rigid, Puritan parameters. Beauty, in short, can create an audience for what would otherwise pass as unpalatable proposals, like sticking a fist deep in your ass as a form of sublime pleasure. It greases the conduits through which marginal positions can be widely diffused; it lubricates an encounter between thing and beholder with ramifications that are never exhausted then and there.