Dave Hickey, in this article, does not seem to be out to make a compelling argument. Rather, his main intent it seems is to wax poetic about how 'good' it had been before - how raw and open and free when the creator was the consumer and as a result had the ability to decide the worth of an object, whether it was cars or art - and disparage the creation of the 'business' of art (or cars, as the comparison was). Is he wrong? Not necessarily, no. But much like just about every other critic of his time (particularly of his time), his main concern seems to be that the changes to the market, custom cars and custom art alike, are homogenizing and being re-packaged in a way to be easily consumable, and no one seems to understand that.
Everyone understands that, however. Everyone understood that. Academic art has always been as such that it held a certain set of styles in high regard while dismissing others as low (different art types at different times, all fluctuating as tastes changed en masse). Even in Hickey's precious world of custom cars, certain mechanical parts and superfluous accents were considered better than others, even by those people that participated in the act of rebuilding their rides to be 'cool'. The consumerism of his world and the world of the art-selling business are exactly the same, and it seem to me that his only problem is that the people dealing art value it for the 'wrong' reason, as though every custom car owner knows exactly the story behind his vehicle.
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