One of the biggest challenges facing the art market is finding new ways to educate buyers about artists. A good example of what the auction houses are trying to do comes in the form of Glenn O’Brien’s essay on Christie’s website that tries to situate Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat within a broader transformation of art. Although Basquiat has gone on to be the more valued artist—and one wonders how much longer that will last—Haring was an innovator who could teach someone like Banksy a thing or two about dealing with aggressive souvenir hunters:
Both artists were workaholics, creating in vastly diverse media virtually non-stop. Their lives were work. I don’t believe it had anything to do with ambition per se, or greed, or any kind of obsessive compulsive mental states, but with an almost magical desire to reclaim the power of the visual artist with the public. It’s no coincidence that both became close with the idol Andy Warhol, because he was another relentless worker who ranged seamlessly from painting, sculpture and prints, to film, video, theater and publishing, but also because Warhol seemed to want to make art itself bigger—to achieve the level of influence by the pop stars he knew like the Beatles and the Stones. […]
That generation of New York artists—Basquiat, Haring, Scharf, Lenny McGurr aka “Futura 2000,” and Richard Hambleton, as well as somewhat older artists like John Feckner—was certainly inspired by the graffiti scene, but what they were doing was more like unauthorized public art. It wasn’t simply about marking out territory, about individuals saying “I’m here” in a world of corporate signs, it was about making art for the great audience, the people on the streets, art that wasn’t a monument to a war hero, or an abstract sculpture funded by a bank, but post-pop popular art. It often had a message and a political dimension, like the May ’68 posters of Atelier Populaire, but first of all it was art. Richard Hambleton’s anthropomorphic black shadows were painted on walls along streets that were still dangerous, and they could throw a chill up the spine as you turned a corner. Keith Haring’s subway chalk drawings provided a non-commercial, populist form of delight for MTA riders. […]
Haring was committed to erasing the distinction between high and low art, but he tired of having his subway drawings “collected” almost as soon as they appeared, and he had been arrested several times making them. In 1986 he opened the Pop Shop on Lafayette Street which sold his art and products he designed. He said, “My shop is an extension of what I was doing in the subway stations, breaking down the barriers between high and low art.”
Basquiat and Haring: A Hurried Generation (Christie’s)
