Life and Career
Leckey was born in Birkenhead, near Liverpool, in 1964. In a 2008 interview in The Guardian he described how he grew up in a working-class family and became a ‘casual’ in his youth. He left school at 16 with one O Level, in art, and at 19 became obsessed with learning about ancient civilizations. In the Guardian interview he described himself as an autodidact, "That's why I use bigger words than I should. It's a classic sign." Following a conversation with his stepfather he took his A Levels and went to an art college in Newcastle but didn’t enjoy it: "It was the early 1990s, when critical theory had swept the nation. The place was full of hippies from down south who were reading Mervyn Peake and Tolkien, and suddenly they were made to read Barthes and Derrida. It was like a Maoist year zero. I became very suspicious of the merits of critical theory…”
He was Film Studies professor at the Städelschule, Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany
Read more about this topic: Mark Leckey
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