The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, Revised and Expanded

This is a pithy collection of essays on the nature, meaning, and destiny of beauty in the late 20th century. For such a slender volume (just 64 pages), the broad scope of these essays covers a lot of ground. Dave Hickey discusses the work of Raphael, Andy Warhol, Caravaggio, and Michel Foucault, traversing centuries of ideas about aesthetics, sexuality, religion, and culture. Hickey, a professor of art criticism and theory at the University of Nevada and the author of a book of short fiction, boldly ventures to compare Robert Mapplethorpe's X Portfolio to Shakespeare's Sonnets. A delight for the mind.