Mike Kelly: Bad Boy
Over and over over not so much now, but throughout my early career
it was this bad boy thing. Bad boy, bad boy, bad boy, and was just like, I don't think I was ever a bad boy
i don't think my work was ever about being a bad boy, it wasn't about being like a snotty teenager or this or that
or that I was anti-intellectual.
Obviously I'm not an anti-intellectual, and yet I felt that these kind of terms were used to put me in my place
because my work didn't fit the cannon of work that was popular at that moment.
It was simply like a cheap put down.
Because I was associated with this so called, abject art movement, in which notions of failure came to play in the discusion of art
and because a lot of my work looks towards so called, low forms
like folk art or lower end mass culture.
I think a lot critics of my work tend to confuse my use of that work with some kind of investment
or I'm raising that up, or that this is some kind of blue collar aesthetic.
Well I might come from that, but I have no love of it, but the art world has changed a lot because recently
such things have found a place in the art world when, you know, fifteen years ago, you never see, in every gallery in New York
some kind of, mass culture referent. Now every gallery has such things, and so all this discussion of slackers has become a positive term
rather than a negative term, and it's like all this kind of discussion doesn't interest me whatsoever because who defines these things.
If I'm a bad boy, there's a thousand times worse boys and girls and it's an academy, so, I'm grandpa when it comes to that.
I don't need to think about it anymore.
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