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Mike Kelly: Bad Boy

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Over and over over not so much now, but throughout my early career

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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

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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

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or that I was anti-intellectual.

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Obviously I'm not an anti-intellectual, and yet I felt that these kind of terms were used to put me in my place

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because my work didn't fit the cannon of work that was popular at that moment.

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It was simply like a cheap put down.

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Because I was associated with this so called, abject art movement, in which notions of failure came to play in the discusion of art

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and because a lot of my work looks towards so called, low forms

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like folk art or lower end mass culture.

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I think a lot critics of my work tend to confuse my use of that work with some kind of investment

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or I'm raising that up, or that this is some kind of blue collar aesthetic.

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Well I might come from that, but I have no love of it, but the art world has changed a lot because recently

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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

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some kind of, mass culture referent. Now every gallery has such things, and so all this discussion of slackers has become a positive term

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rather than a negative term, and it's like all this kind of discussion doesn't interest me whatsoever because who defines these things.

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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.

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I don't need to think about it anymore.

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