1
00:00:06,324 --> 00:00:11,175
Mike Kelly: Bad Boy

2
00:00:30,640 --> 00:00:35,192
Over and over over not so much now, but throughout my early career

3
00:00:35,192 --> 00:00:43,778
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

4
00:00:43,778 --> 00:00:49,096
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

5
00:00:49,096 --> 00:00:51,697
or that I was anti-intellectual.

6
00:00:51,697 --> 00:01:01,128
Obviously I'm not an anti-intellectual, and yet I felt that these kind of terms were used to put me in my place

7
00:01:01,128 --> 00:01:06,288
because my work didn't fit the cannon of work that was popular at that moment.

8
00:01:06,288 --> 00:01:09,881
It was simply like a cheap put down.

9
00:01:09,881 --> 00:01:25,570
Because I was associated with this so called, abject art movement, in which notions of failure came to play in the discusion of art

10
00:01:25,570 --> 00:01:29,968
and because a lot of my work looks towards so called, low forms

11
00:01:29,968 --> 00:01:36,418
like folk art or lower end mass culture.

12
00:01:36,418 --> 00:01:45,319
I think a lot critics of my work tend to confuse my use of that work with some kind of investment

13
00:01:45,319 --> 00:01:52,306
or I'm raising that up, or that this is some kind of blue collar aesthetic.

14
00:01:52,306 --> 00:02:00,439
Well I might come from that, but I have no love of it, but the art world has changed a lot because recently

15
00:02:00,439 --> 00:02:12,307
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

16
00:02:12,307 --> 00:02:23,794
some kind of, mass culture referent. Now every gallery has such things, and so all this discussion of slackers has become a positive term

17
00:02:23,794 --> 00:02:33,041
rather than a negative term, and it's like all this kind of discussion doesn't interest me whatsoever because who defines these things.

18
00:02:33,041 --> 00:02:43,138
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.

19
00:02:43,138 --> 00:02:46,137
I don't need to think about it anymore.

20
00:02:46,137 --> 00:02:47,611
art21.org

21
00:02:47,611 --> 00:02:49,360
pbs.org/art21

22
00:02:49,360 --> 00:02:53,705
2010 Art21, Inc All Rights Reserved