Artist Mike Kelley, RIP

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Punk artist Mike Kelley, a force in contemporary art for more than three decades, has died. He was 57. From the Los Angeles Times:

Writing in Slate in 2005, novelist Jim Lewis said: "I think I could walk into any collection in the world and spot the Mike Kelley piece immediately (and this despite his many imitators)… You can tell the Kelley work because it's the stuff that itches, the stuff that reeks, the stuff that looks like it needs a good bath."

Or, as Times art critic Christopher Knight wrote in 1994, "Kelley is an avatar of the power and humanity inherent in recognizing the radical impurity of human experience. His art searches out dark and soiled places where defects, fault lines and inadequacies are obvious and routine, and where failure takes on the poignant, fragile, even heartbreaking beauty that accompanies any loss of self."

"Mike Kelley dies at 57; L.A. contemporary artist"