Here is the entire quote:
“The public has a right to art. The public is being ignored by most contemporary artists. Art is for everybody. I am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible with as many different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached. The viewer creates the reality, the meaning, the conception of the piece.”
The Keith Haring Journals
Keith Haring (1958-1990) was among that first generation of gay men lost in the initial wave of the plague. He was diagnosed with HIV in late 1988, but he continued to produce his art until the very end, when he could hardly hold a pencil or brush. Haring’s bold lines and primitive figures carry poignant messages of vitality and unity.
Famous for his graffiti-inspired drawings, Haring used the city as a canvas making chalk drawings in subway stations and later started exhibiting in museums. His signature images included various dancing figures, a radiant baby, a flying saucer, large hearts and figures with television heads. This recognizable imagery was soon transferred to the paper and canvas, and the unique energy and optimism of his art, as well as the recognizable style consisting of bold lines and bright colors, has provided him a great affection and admiration.
Haring had a specific concept of what art should represent and strongly believing that it is not something that should be owned and sold but belongs to the community, he opened his “Pop Shop” with affordable items like posters and tee-shirts to make his art widely accessible. Ironic now, when his painting Untitled (1982) sold at auction at Sotheby’s in 2022 for $6,537,500.
Haring’s work is in major private and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) and the Whitney Museum in New York City; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Bass Museum in Miami; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Ludwig Museum in Cologne; and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He also created a wide variety of public works, including the infirmary at Children’s Village in Dobbs Ferry, New York, and the second-floor men’s room in the LGBTQ Community Center in Manhattan, which was later transformed into an office and is known as the “Keith Haring Room”.
His legacy has made a lasting impact on late 20th century art and beyond. During his brief career, Haring invented an entire cartoon universe inhabited with crawling children, barking dogs and dancing figures. Throughout his life, from when he began in the late-1970s until to his passing in 1990, Haring produced work that was both intense and explicit around the subject of sex and sexuality. He was just 31 years old when he left this wretched world in 1990. I cried this morning thinking about him, yet, I have to say that Haring leaves me with a more positive vision for the future.
“My contribution to the world is my ability to draw. I will draw as much as I can for as many people as I can for as long as I can. Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.“
Someone stole my much loved Keith Haring Swatch watch in the early 1990s. I think I know who it was, but when queried, they denied any possibility of having been responsible for it being gone missing. This morning, I saw the same watch on eBay for $1600. The Husband stated: “You couldn’t get $1600 for that watch. You loved that Swatch into a state of ‘very used’. I wish I had $1600, I would buy you a new one.”
For most of the 1980s, I had prints of Haring’s drawings and paintings, some of them torn from Interview, displayed on my fridge. There is a small Haring, held by an Andy Warhol magnet on my stainless steel refrigerator this morning. Some things just don’t change. The display face on my iPhone is a Keith Haring barking dog.
Today, Haring would have, should have, been celebrating his 65th birthday. I like to think that he would be having carrot cake with his friends Jean-Michel Basquiat, Trey Speegle and Andy Warhol.
