THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

Paul Thek’s Death of a Hippie is a great work of art.  It is a shrine to anti-Americanism, to the antipatriarchal.  Yet it speaks in an American language, a low and dirty language.  It must, because it’s speaking to those who are frightened of the low and dirty, who are its enemies.  They are the ones who have positioned you as the low and dirty. The dead hippie is a sign of America’s disgust with and hatred of cultural otherness.  It is the image of its fear of death, the erotic, gender confusion, and visual opulence – its fear of anti-institutional art.  The dead hippie is a statue of creative resistance, murdered.

Kelley/Perfection