Finding money was like chasing a ghost for Thek; it didn’t pay to be what Harold Falckenberg calls “the first exhibition artist.” Thek’s influence on installation art and the grotesque (Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Damien Hirst, and the Chapman brothers, most obviously) is major, and yet he remains under-recognized, partly because The Tomb was likely trashed in 1981 due to shipping and storage complications. Artist’s Artist rounds out Thek’s career, reproducing caustic, early Television Analyzations paintings, atypically tranquil late paintings, and a host of entropic installations for museums. But The Tomb, a harrowingly realistic self-portrait sculpture as a beatnik corpse, is the undisputed apotheosis. Its significance—encapsulating the death of the ’60s, foreshadowing his own death of AIDS—is huge. Artist’s Artist reveals a man constantly motivated to birth a more positive self. Sometimes it worked, but his prescience was always uncanny, and the limitless Thek of the ’60s glimmered and slowly faded just like his hippie, just like the ephemeral promise of that once-limitless decade.