Mike Kelley: 1954-2012 – On Top of The Game Of Art

“Pay for Your Pleasure”
(with the art of a murderer)

From the Los Angeles Times:

… But Fontana, who saw Kelley last week for dinner, said that Kelley’s art-world accomplishments had a price, as he had been actively struggling with what it means to succeed in a world that has become more materialistic and foreign to him.

“He had a deep discomfort in seeing what the art world is now,” Fontana said. “He didn’t like the fact that everything has become so corporate. He said to me: ‘If I were to start now, I would never become a visual artist.’

“He really wanted to be an important artist, and he worked all of his life for that. He found himself at the top of his game and then found that the world he was at the top of was a world that he didn’t like.”
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Very sad for his friends…
A group of colleagues and friends including fellow artists Paul McCarthy and Jim Shaw and collector Kourosh Larizadeh sent an email that they said was “for all Mike’s many friends near and far”:

“Our dear friend the artist Mike Kelley (born 1954 in Detroit) has passed away. Unstintingly passionate, habitually outspoken and immeasurably creative in every genre or material with which he took up–and that was most of them, from performance and sculpture to painting, installation and video, from experimental music to writing in a thousand voices–Mike was an irresistible force in contemporary art. For Mike history existed only to be reconstructed, memory was selective, faulty and willful and life itself vibrant but often dysfunctional. We can hear him disagreeing with us. We cannot believe he is gone. But we know his legacy will continue to touch and challenge anyone who crosses its path. We will miss him. We will keep him with us.”

Others signing the email were Kelley Studio and Emi Fontana, Karen McCarthy, Fredrik Nilsen, Anita Pace, Mary Clare Stevens, Marnie Weber, John C. Welchman.