Week 4: A Home in the Neon – ‘Air Guitar’ by Dave Hickey

“Somehow, in the few years that I have been living here and travelling out of here, this most un homelike of cities has become to function for me as a kind of moral bottom-line… - as a home, in other words.” Within the first paragraph I can already feel alienated to Hickey’s views. ‘The moral bottom-line’ is not a description I would ever attribute to a home. Whilst he talks of refuge and the references to sanctuary and reassurances chime, a suggestion of the concept of home is you at your worst is troubling. I would describe a true home as an extension to the physical structure. A world full of memory and sentiment, almost a shrine to your ideas, history and aspiration. The place where ‘you’ are at your most ‘you’. A home should be a place where you can leave the darkness at the door, leave elements of your life which challenge the bottom line of your morality.

However, in Hickey’s world as he writes as an art critic in the ‘super virtuous high culture of the nineteen nineties’, the simplicity of the Vegas way of life must seem the antidote. Hickey’s love for Vegas, through a series of childhood memories and a romanticised view of the town, ultimately can be compounded down into the city’s complete disregard for social hierarchy. Only money. A person’s reputation, morality, history, outlook, intelligence, appearance or compassion are completely irrelevant to their standing in Vegas as long as they possess the cold hard cash to play at the big tables. “Stakes not Status.” Whilst to many an almost dystopian view, to Hickey, coming from a world of ‘who you’ in the arts, it can act as a simple measure. For someone trying to form an identity or mark their place in the world it’s a dream. A simplistic numerical scale. Quantifiable. A scale which when compared to all others can give an answer or even a ranking. In Hickey’s words “…money, which, I always agree, is the worst way of discriminating among individuals, except for all others.”


It is worth noting before concluding, the Vegas Hickey fell in love with no longer exists. Hickey talks of a time towards the end of Las Vegas’ true era of shining lights. As the star in the middle of the desert had started to be swallowed by large developers interested in selling the idea of the town. As new non-descript developments replace the heart and soul, the bars of freedom, of simplicity the world Hickey fell in love with has begun to fall in on itself. Vegas now stands as a parody of a town which used to revel in being the uncensored unrestrained parody of the world.

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