The Art Guy.(critic Dave Hickey)

Renegade critic and philosopher Dave Hickey finds beauty where others find banality and integrity where others see glitz.

HER VOICE IS SO SAD. You just know she was never on top of the world. She was never on top of anything."

Dave Hickey is sick--he has a fever and would be better off at home in front of the TV watching college football. Instead he's tooling his white Cadillac El Dorado through the sunburned October streets of Las Vegas and singing along with the woman on the car stereo: "I'm on the top of the world, lookin' down on creation ..." He's on his way to speak at an art opening on the campus of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and he's dressed entirely in black, down to his cowboy boots. Feverishly he taps his free hand to the corny rhythm. But this isn't the song he wants me to hear, and he interrupts it, fast-forwarding the tape. "Now, this is one of my favorite songs," he says, as the woman's voice fills the car again and we pull into a parking lot at UNLV. "It's incredible. And it's all wrong as far as pop music is concerned." The famous art critic, never at a loss for words, gushes over the blasting speakers. "Incredible," he says again as the second verse begins. I laugh nervously. Hickey guides me through a dissection of the four-minute song's sophisticated structure--the turnarounds and verse extensions, the modulation--getting more excited as the last part approaches. I know what's coming. I've heard the Carpenters' "Goodbye to Love" since I was a teenager. I hate this song.

The final chorus fills the parked car, 75 seconds of the seventies--Karen Carpenter's multilayered ah-ah-ah-ah and a fuzztone guitar. "This is the most beautifully structured rock guitar solo," Hickey says, singing along and pointing out highlights. "Then he does this little kind of Scarlatti figure ..." Scarlatti? "Yeah, Baroque figure." The song ends and Hickey, who at sixty looks like a cross between Ed Asner and Uncle Charley from My Three Sons, turns the tape off and quickly sobers up. "Anyway, that's really cool," he says in his soft Texas drawl as we climb out of the car. "But it's like a perfectly made little machine--signifying nothing."

I'll say. But as we walk across the campus where he has taught since 1989, I'm humming that damn chorus, thinking about poor Karen Carpenter, and thumbing through the files in the back of my…