Ten years ago, the Morgan Library & Museum decided it was time to bring its collection up to speed on the art of drawing in the 20th and 21st centuries — a daunting task in itself, and even more improbable in the face of a superheated, late-capitalist art market: at the feast of the trophy-eaters, would the museum be forced to content itself with scraps?
Keith Haring
Posted inArt
Keith Haring and the Artist as Witness
SAN FRANCISCO — At the end of the 2012 documentary How to Survive a Plague, we see a group of ACT UP protestors march on the nation’s capital with the ashes of their dead, a counterprotest to the exhibition of the AIDS Quilt on the Washington Mall.
Posted inArt
At New York’s LGBT Center, a Renovation Pushes Art to the Fore
On Tuesday the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center (LGBT Center) in New York’s Greenwich Village offered a sneak peek at its nearly complete $9.2 million renovation, which, among other things, aims to showcase the exceptional art sprinkled throughout the building.
Posted inArt
Real or Not? New York Hotel Flaunts Contested Keith Haring Painting
High up among the stars, red and green dancers wriggle. They squiggle across the upturned belly of a writhing, orange snake, itself carried aloft by two bold stick figures. It’s obviously a Keith Haring work. Or at least it looks like one. But in case you had questions, a golden plaque beside it announces, “Called Fake By The Haring Foundation Without Even Examining the Painting.”
Posted inBooks
Break Through the Lines with Artist-Designed Coloring Books
For anyone soothed by the careful filling in of white space or enthused by wrecking it all with random slashes of color and unconventional hues, there’s been a recent influx of coloring books created by artists.
Posted inArt
Pop Music’s Love Affair with Contemporary Art
For too long there has been a large divide (whether real or imagined) between visual art and music. After all, what we came to call art most likely formed out of traditional ceremonies with music, dance, shrines, costumes, and ritual objects all working together. Now, that boundary is collapsing again.
Posted inArt
Why Are We Revisiting the Times Square Show?
Thirty-two years after being labeled the “first radical art show of the ’80s,” the Times Square Show, a raucous and revolutionary DIY art exhibition held in an abandoned massage parlor on 41st Street and Seventh Avenue in the old dirty and devastated Times Square, has been revived by the Hunter College Art Galleries in the exhibition Times Square Show Revisited.
Posted inOpinion
Keith Haring Products Redefine the Ability to Find Pleasure in Art
Last week I got an email advertising a collaboration between Shepard Fairey’s apparel company OBEY and the Keith Haring Foundation, resulting in T-shirts, tank tops and baseball hats — including one with an unsettling combination of Haring’s three-eyed face and Fairey’s OBEY graphic — sold at mall hipster-mecca Urban Outfitters. This was enough to make begin questioning the Keith Haring Foundation’s treatment of the artist’s legacy — and then I heard about the Tenga x Keith Haring sex toys.
Posted inOpinion
Bangin’ Haring Baby Bib
Walking through a Duane Reade the other day looking for a snack, I stumbled across this Keith Haring Baby Bib by Bumkins.
Posted inOpinion
Happy Birthday, Keith Haring!
Google salutes Keith Haring on his birthday today with a homepage doodle. The American street artist turned pop culture darling would have been 54. Here are a few places to see Harings in New York today.
Posted inNews
MTV’s New Art Spots Have Potential to Reach 600M Viewers
MTV is trying to rekindle the “visual playground” of the 1980s and they hope the new art commercials by Rashaad Newsome, Mickalene Thomas, Tala Madani, Jani Ruscica and Mads Lynnerup will help them do it.
Posted inArt
Always Here, Always Queer and Art History Is Starting to Get Used To It
While at the landmark exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the Brooklyn Museum, I realized I had to start my review with a statement that will look simple and quite possibly stupid: Hide/Seek is more than David Wojnarowicz’s “A Fire In My Belly.”