Mike Kelly: Bad Boy

Over and over and 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 about being a bad boy, it wasn't about being like a snotty teenager or this or that

or that I was an 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 and 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 bad 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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