Has Keith Haring aged well?

Nagel, however, was a genius, and his work just becomes more and more relevant all the time.

"Kid like his stuff!" Kids also like Garbage Pail Kids.

I'll be obvious and predictable here re: Nagel so you'll have no problem figuring out what I think of the guy's art.

yes he's aged terribly well, despite two lots of revivalists;
the late 80's early 90's flyer designers, and the fashion types who put him all over destiny's child's skirts and what not 2 years ago.

For the record I am new here

Is it worth seeing this film -"The Universe of Keith Haring' - that's on at the Institute for Contemporary Arts this week?

I'm worried its going to be 90% interviews and not enough art.

Not much love for the man on this thread, which is a shame imho.

Anyhoo, enjoyable new BBC documentary on BBC IPlayer and floating around elsewhere.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000kqk5

I think Haring was brilliant, will check that doc later.

He's aged well for me; I never thought much of him when I was younger and more "serious" about art. I've come to love him more and more as I've gotten older. I associate him with the early golden age of hip hop; big, bold, fun, eternal.

yeah like if I see his art I hear "Genius of Love" by Tom Tom Club

the documentary was good, lots of great 80s NYC footage and a well-chosen soundtrack

He's aged well for me; I never thought much of him when I was younger and more "serious" about art. I've come to love him more and more as I've gotten older. I associate him with the early golden age of hip hop; big, bold, fun, eternal.

― Tōne Locatelli Romano (PBKR), Monday, 6 July 2020 13:35 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah, this goes for me too. I'll check out the documentary!

such a thread title would more apply to a talentless contemporary of Haring's like Julian Schnabel who sucked as a painter and now sucks as a director, just a mediocre chancer with a high opinion of himself. There is something uniquely awesome about Haring's talent that is beyond question imo

Loving Haring's art, though its ubiquity did do him in briefly in the late 90s/early 2000s.

Schnabel is execrable, always has been

I hated Haring's art growing up; it was everywhere, it was (of course) incredibly commercialized, it seemed cloying and twee. But I like him more and more as time goes on and I see new pieces of his I'd never seen before.

I wonder if I only ever saw the not-as-good sanitized stuff made for t-shirts and corporate-sponsored public spaces before, and only now with tumblr &etc am I seeing his more adventurous art (sexual content, experimenting with wilder color palettes, doing more interesting things with the lines). I can't think of many other artists that I grew to like like this!

yeah like if I see his art I hear "Genius of Love" by Tom Tom Club

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, 6 July 2020 13:38 (two hours ago) link

Yes!!!

That's on my playlist with mostly 77-82 postpunk (Talking Heads, Blondie, ESG) and hiphop designed to transport me to an early-80s NYC loft party with a blaring DJ and Haring and Basquiat painting on the walls.

The "sanitized" stuff has a lot of value too I think, it works well as a gateway into a lot of other things. And as others have mentioned earlier in the thread, kids respond really well to his work and it often encourages them to draw.

first response hof tbh

last time I was in New York I stumbled my way into the Haring bathroom at the Center, a good experience

Great documentary - thanks for flagging.

You really get a sense of how he was inseparable from the NYC environment at that time,and how great it was to see him creating artworks, and also an insight into his personality.

I travelled up to the Liverpool Tate to see his exhibition last year. It was good to see his work but - despite the nightclub flyers and videos - I think a lot of his work can look a bit dead and lifeless in a gallery unless it's skilfully curated

There's also this earlier doc, which covers much of the same territory and with most of the same talking heads but worth a dive for the footage or to compare and contrast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGgQJlmRMQ8

I've always been interested in the NY downtown scene from the 70s-80s, I remember going to an Andy Warhol exhibition in London years back and being in seventh heaven at the video installation that was showing hours of his cable TV show on a loop.

This YT archive is interesting too, a guy called Nelson Sullivan who obsessively documented NYC in the 80s, up until his death.

He was an early video diarist/vlogger and very much plugged into the whole 'downtown 500' scene, tons of footage of RuPaul, John Sex, Sylvia Miles, Lady Bunny, Wigstock, Club Kids & Alig, some Haring (including some *amazing* footage of his NYE party in what looks like the Shafrazi gallery in 1983)

He left behind hundreds of hours of footage which has been periodically digitised and uploaded.

http://www.youtube.com/user/5ninthavenueproject/videos

Forever grateful to my Central Illinois University (ISU) having one of his last university gallery shows when I was in school. Our gallery director, Barry Blinderman at the time brought really great gallery shows on the reg, David Wojnarowicz, a virtual reality symposium, all kinds of great late 80s/early 90s stuff. I still love Keith Haring art work. His Chicago visits have been preserved lately -

I mean, only a grinch could hate this:

https://www.haring.com/!/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/KwongChi_PopShoppose2.jpg

David Wojnarowicz

I went to the big retrospective maybe two years ago at the Whitney and it blew me away.

xxp unfortunately the guy who ran the 5ninthavenueproject channel passed away recently (an old friend of NS who was in some of the videos) so I’m not sure what happens in terms of unseen videos re YouTube

the ever reliable Soul Jazz put this out as a companion to the Tate Liverpool exhibition, it's a really good snapshot of the music scene that provided the soundtrack top the documentary:
https://soundsoftheuniverse.com/sjr/product/the-world-of-keith-haring

Thank you so much for that. I love this kind of danceable post-punk/new-wave funk mixture.

PBKR, you'd love 'Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor' by Tim Lawrence. Great book, has a lot about Haring and his association with the Mudd Club and other downtown spots of the time

wonder if I only ever saw the not-as-good sanitized stuff made for t-shirts and corporate-sponsored public spaces before, and only now with tumblr &etc am I seeing his more adventurous art (sexual content, experimenting with wilder color palettes, doing more interesting things with the lines). I can't think of many other artists that I grew to like like this!

Idk, Haring reduces his figures to symbols and employs them as a simple language of opposing dualities: Liberation/opression, birth/death etc. His langauge expresses that kind of dualistic antagonism very clearly but it really does not deal well with the more complex, personal ("edgy") subjects IMO. By all rights, this should be his moment.

I don't think his ubiquity has worked against him, either. Now or ever Heck, his main appeal to a few ppl here seems to be that he's emblematic of a time and place. When you think of Haring you think of subway platforms and handball courts on the FDR, and that's an important context.

Schnabel is a very easy target and it's hard to think of another artist of his renown whose work has been equally overlooked for so long tbf.

That Soul Jazz compilation is on Spotify too, in two versions, both incomplete in different ways.
I made a playlist that includes the missing tracks (except the original “Walking On Thin Ice”).

xps

Xpost: Schnabel is a pig and a bad artist.

A very terrible tutor at a technical college where I was textile design student once told me to check out some Schnabel and I had a look at his garbage book and was struck at what a pretentious, self-absorbed pile of garbage he was and the only bit of the book I enjoyed was him recounting about the time Clement Greenberg basically told him he was crap!

seeing that last sketch of Haring's from his hospital bed almost made me cry.

PBKR, you'd love 'Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor' by Tim Lawrence. Great book, has a lot about Haring and his association with the Mudd Club and other downtown spots of the time

― blue light or electric light (the table is the table), Wednesday, 8 July 2020 02:01 (ten hours ago) link

Thanks for the recommendation! What I have wanted was for Will Hermes' "Love Goes to Buildings on Fire" to keep going through the early 80s, so this may be exactly what I am looking for.

I read it right after the Ghost Ship fire and it nearly did me in emotionally, but it was well worth it.

Omg schnabel's book. I forgot that he fancied himself a writer as well. It is seriously the literary equivalent of making a jerk-off motion with your right hand. By christ, it's awful. And those broken plate paibtings of his are even less photogenic than Adam Driver, to top it off. But the few I've seen in person are violent, intense, subtly poetic and pretty fucking raw. Turner he ain't, but I'd say they justify the momentary blip of enthusiasm they generated. His revolting personality aside, that is.

Fair enough!

I will also say that though I haven't seen it since it was released on DVD, I do remember Before Night Falls being a rather beautiful film.

My fave bit of Schnabel narcissism is the completely superfluous scene in his Basquiat movie where Gary Oldman depicts the great J Schnabel as an enigmatic genius imparting some of his hard won wisdom onto the novice artist!

Yes his cameo in that was nauseating. when Schnabel left Mary Boone for Castelli, Basquiat allegedly told her, "don't worry Mary, I'm going to be a much more famous artist than Julian" and he was right.

Schnabel and Haring not really comparable anyway imo, or even Basquiat and Haring. There's a more interesting comparison to be drawn between Haring and someone like Barbara kruger.

for me the lasting groove was all about the statue of liberty painting filled with kids chaos.
for all of keiths issues, his heart was clearly in the right place.
i loved the documentary.
so, question, other than duck rock, which other albums featured his art ?

xp
I don't think of Basquiat's work as belonging to the 80's in my own stupid uncultured mind, not in any kind of serious art history theory sense. Just in the way I appreciate it's qualities - it reminds me of some of the great abstract expressionists of the painters of the 50's in some ways I can't really express atm. But I would categorically state he is deffo classic and a great painter!

i like the simplicity of things like the baby and the wolf, but also the huge labyrinthine things that he did (like the pop shop up there)

statue of liberty was great, espech the guy finding his old art on it, and the last baby was sad / touching. but the other thing that'll stick with me was the toilet mural.

I was at the opening of the pop shop. Maybe 11 or so years old. Shot by a bbc reporter and used in an old documentary that’s somewhere on YouTube. You can see me saying “I like his art, I thinks it really cool”.

11 year old children always are the best art critics tbf!

someone please find the dan s video footage for the ilX archive.
yeah, the final baby and epic toilet mural were definitely special moments.

Lived a couple blocks from the pop shop when I was in college. LOVE Haring. Will absolutely watch this.

https://www.discogs.com/artist/1579623-Keith-Haring?type=Credits&subtype=Visual&filter_anv=0

What is Haring's legacy, as far as direct influence on other artists? There were a few obvious imitators with little to offer. New Yorkers would remember De La Vega, a milquetoast street artist whose banal platitudes written in chalk on the pavement seemed to greet you outside every busy subway station. He even opened his own vague approximation of the Pop Shop in Spanish Harlem and, later, the East Village. De La Vega's line struck a more subdued tone than the electric buzz of Haring and his main character felt most at home in a goldfish bowl. He gave a talk at my school dressed as Zoro and was duly and hilariously eviscerated by teenage kids with considerably more to offer during the Q&A.

There's an episode of Doug where he has to do a painting for art class, and it gets ruined by his dog... but the teacher totally loves it and enters it in a student art competition! The judge, a VERY FAMOUS ARTIST, was named Werner Schnozel- which I realized years later is a play on Julian Schnabel and weiner schnitzel. Idk if the charachter was based on Schnabel or just the name, there is plausible deniability but he was an obnoxious narcissist (with a big nose, natch).

https://youtu.be/GPlzHR_WyVA?t=797

I'm at 13:45

excellent stuff - and you were not wrong ..

Has dan seltzer aged well? 8)

(argh, spelling, sorry)

Nope

I don't think of Basquiat's work as belonging to the 80's in my own stupid uncultured mind, not in any kind of serious art history theory sense. Just in the way I appreciate it's qualities - it reminds me of some of the great abstract expressionists of the painters of the 50's in some ways I can't really express atm. But I would categorically state he is deffo classic and a great painter!

― calzino, Wednesday, July 8, 2020 7:39 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this is interesting Calz- thinking about this a little and a couple of similar artists might be Cy Twombly or Philip Guston perhaps? Not "classic" abstract expressionists but adjacent I suppose

I love Philip Guston and haven't thought about him much for a while but as I get older and more fucked up I can relate to a lot of his work! I think his early stuff was maybe a not very strong and distinctive sort of abstract expressionism, but when he found his artistic voice or whatever you want to call it, like you say something in its DNA is AE or its adjacent. I'm trying not to talk absolute bollox and look foolish here because some ilxers are probably art tutors or students etc!

well anyway fuck it all opinions are amateur really

yeah I'm an amateur ab ex fan too, they just seem visually similar to me is all! probably Haring knew all about those guys, you could hardly avoid them if you were an NYC art world person I guess?

I wonder what kind of art Haring would have created if he grew up in Scunthorpe!

I almost ended up on a YTS signpainting job with the local council. Should have stuck to it, could have been a contender etc!

I went to HS and college where Haring grew up and it's always so weird that he came from there.

yeah he sort of does come from the US version of Scunthorpe

Is Scunthorpe rural, conservative, and full of Mennonites?

northern shithole, formerly a steeltown not so much of that now, and full of gobshites who probably do vote conservative

an unfashionable provincial dump basically!

probably more like Warhol's Pittsburgh

I really liked the costumes Haring made for Grace Jones, especially the dress for her Roseland Ballroom performance New Year's Eve 1987

I don't think of Basquiat's work as belonging to the 80's in my own stupid uncultured mind, not in any kind of serious art history theory sense. Just in the way I appreciate it's qualities - it reminds me of some of the great abstract expressionists of the painters of the 50's in some ways I can't really express atm. But I would categorically state he is deffo classic and a great painter!

― calzino, Wednesday, July 8, 2020 7:39 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this is interesting Calz- thinking about this a little and a couple of similar artists might be Cy Twombly or Philip Guston perhaps? Not "classic" abstract expressionists but adjacent I suppose

― Neil S, Thursday, July 9, 2020 8:28 AM (fifteen hours ago)

Calzino - i think this is absolutely spot on fwiw, you're right to place him in that tradition imo and it's probably what he was reacting to in some way, even going back to German expressionism. It's evident enough in the emphasis on "gesture" in Basqiat's stuff, probably. But maybe even more so in all the introspective chaos.

With Twombly, there's also the abrasive line, of course- and you see that the art of skateboarders like Neck Face and Ed Templeton, and maybe going back to the Germans.

There's a lot of Guston in someone like Carroll Dunham

Fandom is not a profession!

You have confidence in your judgements, so might as well trust your eye.

i love haring both as a designer and an artist

the radiant baby

love Basquiat's art but never considered him an abstract expressionist, he's much closer to Haring

Haring's art seems connected to Burroughs to me

Haring, Twombly, Basquiat, Dunham are great, but Guston is the greatest of them all

Love Twombly and Basquiat...don't really get the Dunham thing, even though I technically know him, have had dinner with him, etc. He's a nice guy. His art leaves me a little cold.

https://i.imgur.com/GdtCRU7.jpg

^^ Strange corona virus related graffiti art spotted in Portobello Road yesterday...

Turing patterns sometimes look like Keith Haring art:

https://teamhoudini.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/turing-pattern.jpg