The Secret
Mike Kelley American
Not on view
This triptych explores America’s tangled obsessions with celebrity, sex, and violence. In the left panel, Kelley offers a Swiftian "modest proposal," inspired by then-President Bill Clinton’s sex scandal, to cure the puritanical impetus behind his impeachment. In the center and right-hand panels, the artist juxtaposes a poster for a children’s movie from Steven Spielberg’s Land Before Time franchise with chilling testimony from a man who stalked the famous director about the time of the film’s release. With typical dark humor, Kelley suggests that the secret behind America’s particular dysfunction lies in the infantilism bred in the bone of capitalist mass culture.
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