Keith Haring, 'Untitled,' 1989. (Courtesy Keith Haring Foundation)

The trustees of the Keith Haring Foundation have decided to disband the authentication committee. Julia Gruen, the foundation’s executive director, made the announcement today. The foundation will no longer be accepting requests to review artworks attributed to the late artist, but will be honoring submissions for review that were received up to Sept. 1. The disbandment comes just months after the Warhol Foundation and Basquiat estate announced they would cease authenticating artworks because of the risks posed by legal action stemming from disputes over such judgments.

From the announcement:

After careful consideration, the trustees came to the conclusion that the public and the Foundation’s charitable mission would be better served if the resources presently required for the operation of the authentication committee were redirected to purposes more directly related to the charitable goals designated by the Foundation’s founder, the artist Keith Haring.  The Foundation is exploring the development of a catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work.

The foundation will continue its mission of maintaining and protecting Haring’s legacy and making grants to nonprofit groups provide educational support to underprivileged kids and organizations that provide prevention and care and spread awareness about AIDS.

Keith Haring Dance Egg. The Keith Haring version of one of Tenga's most popular toys, the “Egg” and “Cup." (Courtesy Opening Ceremony)

Dana Jennings takes a look at a number of new art books, including ones by Robert Longo and Ryan McGinley, whose photographs, she writes, "are songs of innocence." [NYT]

Shepard Fairey's new mural is unveiled in London's "Pleasure Garden." Here's a slide show of some of the other street art on view. [The Guardian]

Keith Haring Foundation teams up with Tenga for new line of high-art sex toys. [Bowery Boogie]

A London exhibition presents Edvard Munch as video artist and filmmaker. [Bloomberg]

The National Academy has elected 23 new academicians, including Richard Artschwager, Robert Gober, Robert Irwin, Joan Jonas, Bruce Nauman, Joel Shapiro, Cindy Sherman and Richard Tuttle. [ArtDaily]

"The Bauhaus stank of garlic." [London Review of Books via @frieze_magazine] (free registration required)

The Wall Street Journal takes a bold stance and condemns all those people destroying Picassos right now. [WSJ]

More trouble in California: LACMA cuts staff and hours. [LA Times]

Here's a new Tate Shots video that compares the work of J.M.W. Turner, Claude Monet and Cy Twombly. [YouTube]

(Photo courtesy Brooklyn Museum and Keith Haring Foundation)

The Brooklyn Museum is posting Keith Haring's journals online, one page per day, for the duration of the exhibition "Keith Haring: 1978-1982." While the exhibition spans four years of Haring's life just prior to his becoming a celebrated artist, his journals go even further back, all the way to 1971, when the artist was 12 years old. While you can see some of these journals in person at the exhibition, some of which have been published in book form (Keith Haring Journals (2010)), viewing them online is, surprisingly, a lot more personal.

The online journals offer the opportunity for in-depth scrutiny of his messy handwriting, his whimsical doodles and his memorabilia stuck into the pages and hand-colored. When you view them at the museum, in contrast, they're placed in glass cases and you feel pressured to move on so the next person can get a good look. Reading them online, you can linger for as long as you like and have the chance to notice things that might have otherwise escaped you, like Haring's tabulations of his fiscal transactions at the age of 12—the $0.11 deposit on March 1, 1971; his meticulous attention to detail—keeping track of letters he "got" and "sent" at camp; and early signs of his penchant for advocacy that he would later come to be known for—such as a depiction of a sad-looking "Mother Earth" with a thought bubble that reads "Help!!"

The journals—fading paper and all—are a rare treat worth spending some time with.

Keith Haring, 'Untitled,' 1982. (Courtesy Sotheby's)

The art world is abuzz with Keith Haring these days. With the Brooklyn Museum exhibiting his early work, galleries and cultural institutions like MoMA and Pace Prints have also gotten on board and now Sotheby’s has announced its own selling exhibition, "Keith Haring: Shine On." Opening March 30, it presents 32 works across a wide range of mediums, like canvases, tarps and sculpture, ranging in value from $25,000 to $1.5 million.

One thing you won't find at the Sotheby's exhibition, however, is the artist's famous Subway Drawings, of which there are 31 on view at the Brooklyn Museum, all on loan from a private collection.

"We haven’t included them because we cannot guarantee authenticity," said Miety Heiden, head of contemporary private sales at Sotheby's. "People have been trying for years and years to get them authenticated."

According to Julia Gruen, executive director of the Keith Haring Foundation, the Foundation does not authenticate Subway Drawings. "We don't know how many still exist," she told The Observer over email. "Probably hundreds."

Subway Drawings are, however, to be found in "Spring Fever," an group show currently on view at the Chelsea gallery of dealer Tony Shafrazi who, back when his gallery was in SoHo, gave Haring his first solo show. Mr. Shafrazi is exhibiting 12 pieces by Haring, including three Subway Drawings, all of them for sale--"if and when we have a proper offer," said director Hiroko Onoda. The show also includes Haring's paintings and tarps, and an enamel-on-steel sculpture from 1987 that is similar to a 1986 sculpture that achieved $1.8 million at Sotheby's last November, surpassing its high estimate of $1.5 million.

"If anyone is a true Keith Haring fan and a connoisseur of that era, in the '80s, it’s at the core of what they’re doing, Ms. Onoda said of the Subway Drawings, acknowledging that "some people might shy away" from them due to the authentication issues.

While it may regularly sell above its estimates at public auction, Haring's work has not sold as well as his peers like Jean-Michel Basquiat. According to the Artnet database, Basquiat's current worldwide auction record is the $14.6 million achieved at Sotheby's New York at the height of the last art market boom in May, 2007, for an untitled painting from 1981. Last June, a Basquiat painting from the same year made $8.7 million at Sotheby's in London. Haring's record is just $2.8 million, for an ink-on-tarpaulin piece from 1982 that sold at Christie's New York in May, 2007.

"[Haring] has always been somebody we felt was undervalued,” Ms. Heiden said. "His work is relatively cheap for what it is.”

Whether or not the renewed interest in Haring's work, as exemplified by the Brooklyn Museum show, will bleed over into renewed interest by collectors and higher sales at the auction houses and galleries is difficult to say. "It helps to give them confidence that he’s seen as a real artist and not just a street artist," said Ms. Heiden. "Will it make a huge difference in prices? I’m not so sure."

To honor Haring's nightlife days, Sotheby's has painted the S2 gallery black and invited Fab 5 Freddy to DJ. "We wanted to create a Club 57 feel," said Ms. Heiden. In addition to Fab 5 Freddy, there are expected to be a bevy of Haring's old pals coming out, as there were for the Rammellzee opening at Suzanne Geiss Company recently. But after all, people shouldn't get too crazy. "This is in the end a selling exhibition," Ms. Heiden said and laughed. "It’s not a club."

Sarah Douglas contributed reporting.

MONDAY, MARCH 12

Conversation: David LaChapelle in Conversation with Lyle Rexer at SVA Theater
As part of the "Dear Dave" conversation series at the School of Visual Arts Theater, which brings together an internationally renowned photographer with a critic, curator, writer or artist, David LaChapelle will be in conversation with Lyle Rexer, a New York-based writer and critic, in conjunction with Mr. LaChapelle's current exhibition, "Earth Laughs in Flowers," at Fred Torres Collaborations. If you haven't been to the exhibition to see Mr. LaChapelle's new large-scale still-lifes composed of flowers and human detritus, head to the gallery before the conversation--they're in the same neighborhood. Before then, you can check out the slide show. —Rozalia Jovanovic
School of Visual Arts Theater, 333 West 23rd Street, New York, 6:30 p.m.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 14

Screening: Gerhard Richter Painting at Film Forum
After what felt like a long, brutal wait, Kino Lorber's brilliant filmic portrait of the German painter Gerhard Richter working on his bewitching abstract paintings arrives in New York. The film will be in town through March 27. —Andrew Russeth
Film Forum, 209 West Houston, New York, various times

Tour: American Federation of Arts Tour of the 2012 Whitney Biennial
If you haven't seen the Whitney Biennial yet, and you're willing to shell out a few more bucks for admission, here's a good reason to go: Elisabeth Sussman, co-curator of the 2012 biennial, will be giving a private tour. Reserve tickets soon! --Michael H. Miller
Whitney Museum, 945 Madison Avenue, 6-7:30 p.m., $75 per person.

THURSDAY, MARCH 15

Opening: Hernan Bas, "Occult Contemporary" at Lehmann Maupin
Hernan Bas’s "Occult Contemporary" explores the recent resurgence in interest in the supernatural in mass media. Inspired by Baudelaire’s imaginative depictions of the devil, Mr. Bas presents new paintings that render the devil as shown in traditional texts and folklore. —R.J.
Lehmann Maupin, 540 West 26th Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

Opening: John Newman "New Work" at Tibor de Nagy Gallery
New works by the playful sculptor John Newman should be a draw. They're kind of like if Tim Burton ate a whole bunch of candy and made an entire sculpture show in one night while listening to Panic at the Disco. Though Mr. Newman probably took his time. -- Dan Duray
Tibor de Nagy, 724 Fifth avenue, at w 57 street, 6-8 p.m.

Panel Discussion: Kehinde Wiley, "The World Stage: Israel," at the Jewish Museum
Painter Kehinde Wiley has a new show at the Jewish Museum, which he will discuss with pop culture journalist Lola Ogunnaike. --M.H.M.
Jewish Museum, 1109 5th Avenue, New York, $15, 6:30 p.m.

FRIDAY, MARCH 16

Opening: "Keith Haring 1978-1982," at the Brooklyn Museum
Keith Haring, who died in 1990, was a quintessential New York street artist, and is one of the most recognizable figures in 20th-century art, known for his dense colorful murals, his AIDS activism, and his Pop Shop. How many revelations about his career can yet another exhibition of his work possibly bring to light? Many. Come check out the Brooklyn museum's sprawling exhibition, which will present some little-known work by the late artist including language-based work, subway drawings and a 23-foot Sumi ink scroll painting for which the museum had to extend a wall. This might also be a good time to take in the numerous sites around the city that house Keith Haring works. —R.J.
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, 11 a.m.-6 p.m.

Opening: "Today" at Lisa Cooley
Lower East Side mainstay Lisa Cooley will inaugurate her new 4,800-square-foot space with a brief group show (it runs only through March 25) named after Frank O'Hara's poem "Today," which begins, "Oh! Kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!" It includes a full lineup of Ms. Cooley's artists, including Michael Bauer (whose work is pictured in the slide show), Andy Coolquitt, Alex Olson and Frank Haines. —A.R.
Lisa Cooley, 107 Norfolk Street, New York, 6-9 p.m.

SATURDAY, MARCH 17

Opening: Francesca DiMattio, "Table Setting and Flower Arranging," at Salon 94 Bowery
If hip, twisted architectural abstract paintings are your thing, be sure to catch this latest opening at the Bowery. There probably won't be any classes based on that opening sentence, but you could always strike up a conversation with someone at the party about those two subjects. You'd be surprised what people on the Lower East Side know about the florinary arts. --D.D.
Salon 94 Bowery, 243 Bowery, 6-9 p.m.

Keith Haring. "Untitled," 1981. Courtesy Keith Haring Foundation.

Keith Haring, who died in 1990, was a quintessential New York street artist and is one of the most recognizable figures in 20th century art, known for his dense colorful murals, his AIDS activism, and his Pop Shop. How many revelations about his career can yet another exhibition of his work possibly bring to light? Very many, according to Raphaela Platow, curator of a survey of his early work that opens at the Brooklyn Museum on March 16.

“The Keith Haring who did a lot of video. The Keith Haring who curated many shows,” said Ms. Platow, who is director and chief curator of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, where the exhibition was on view in the fall. There are sides of Haring that we don’t know. “He organized 30 shows in four years. And he wrote his own press releases. They’re hilarious. Then he moved to an entire phase where he did nothing but word-based pieces. Works based on words. Different iterations. Lots of collages. Video works that he created and that are about the variability of words, inspired by linguistics.”

“Keith Haring: 1978-1982” presents work from the first four, very raw years of Haring’s career—before he traveled the world, designed a jacket for a Madonna video, went on MTV, and painted Grace Jones’s body; before the Absolut and Swatch ads. It’s the first large-scale exhibition to focus exclusively on the period that began when he came to New York from Pittsburgh to study at the School of Visual Arts, and ended when he created the images that would make him famous, and commercial. The show comes to New York at a time of increased interest in street art. Last year saw the wildly popular Art in the Streets exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, curated by Jeffrey Deitch; it was planned to travel to the Brooklyn Museum, but the museum pulled out for financial reasons. The Haring show may serve as a kind of replacement; he’s considered the spiritual godfather to many of today’s street artists.

In organizing the show, Ms. Platow started with questions she had about Mr. Haring’s work. “I wondered how he got to the point where he could create these amazing large figurative pieces by the time he was in his mid-20s,” she said.

A look at Haring’s journals reveals that there is much to work with in this period. There are examples of his experimentation with words, and the results of cut-up exercises he did à la William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, who were both major influences at the time, as well as examples of gouache cut-outs he did when exploring Matisse’s practice. He documented his artistic breakthroughs. An entry from Nov. 7, 1978, reads, “I have just completed another landmark (for me, that is) painting. It is the first time I ever tried to utilize both arms to control two brushes.” Interspersed with the writing are small drawings of penises, pyramids, dogs and scenes of New York City.

And Haring was an avid video maker. “He recorded his own very performative creations of these abstract patterns sometimes on the floor of his studio or the wall of the studio, literally covered the entire space and videotaped it,” said Ms. Platow. “He considered the video the work of art, not the drawing itself.” His early experimental video works explored the intersection between drawing, space, movement and language. In Phonics (1980), Mr. Haring had his friends, including the artist Kenny Scharf, intone various phonemes, chosen at random. In Machines, he shot a close-up of a mouth formulating sound signals based on Morse code.

It was in 1981 that the imagery now most associated with Haring first made an appearance in his art—the barking dog, the “radiant baby,” the flying saucer, the pyramid.

Some of the pieces in the Brooklyn show, such as a few examples of the early drawings and the word pieces, were included in the Whitney Museum retrospective in 1997, as well as gallery exhibitions like the Barbara Gladstone show during the summer of 2011, shortly after Gladstone began representing his estate, but the Brooklyn show is the largest one to focus on the artist’s formative years, and there are, Ms. Platow said, good reasons to bring the early material out of the vault right now. Her inspiration to look more deeply into Haring’s work came eight years ago, when she was curating an exhibition of street artist Barry McGee at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, and first learned what a significant influence Haring has had on a younger generation. “Like so many artists who draw inspiration from urban culture and the street, [Mr. McGee] was really inspired and informed by Keith Haring. And here I was, a German. I had never even heard of [the term] ‘campy’ before.”

Looking for ways to shed new light on Haring’s career led Ms. Platow to the Keith Haring Foundation, which is in New York and has a warehouse in New Jersey, where she went through boxes and boxes of archival materials. “I went to the warehouse and we opened crates that hadn’t been opened since the late ’70s. We rolled out these amazing large pieces on paper.”

According to Julia Gruen, the foundation’s executive director, Ms. Platow’s visit was “a serendipitous moment.” The foundation was, she said, just finishing work on a monograph that Rizzoli published in 2008, with contributions from then art dealer Jeffrey Deitch and his gallery director, Suzanne Geiss, both of whom had extensive experience with Haring’s art.

It was in the course of putting together that monograph that Ms. Gruen began to realize that the materials should be exhibited. “They should not just be reproduced in books,” she said. “They should be seen.”

Before taking the exhibition to Cincinnati, where it finished its run at the Contemporary Arts Center in September, Ms. Platow debuted it, in 2010, at the Kunsthalle Wien, in Vienna, Austria. It was a huge hit—the second-most visited show since the Kunsthalle opened in 1992—proving that Haring has fans the world over. “I think the fact that the show opened in Vienna is a testament to the universality of what he created,” said Tricia Laughlin Bloom, the project curator for the show’s Brooklyn presentation. “His work really speaks across time, space and cultural divides, and that bears out when you look at his exposure internationally.”

People in Europe have heard about the Pop Shop, said Ms. Platow, “and they’ve heard about the East Village.”

Haring may have had his immediate audience in the nightclubs of New York, but, while he was alive, the aesthetic appreciation of his work was more pronounced overseas. “Even in Keith’s lifetime, his work was far more appreciated in Europe,” said Ms. Gruen. “And far more accepted. Those things that caused art connoisseurs to throw their hands up here in America just seemed like no problem in Europe.”

To give the presentation a hometown angle, the Brooklyn Museum has augmented the show with additional archival materials from the foundation as well as works from local private collections according to Ms. Laughlin Bloom.

“We’ll have a set of 20 great Polaroid portraits that Haring did between 1979 and ’82,” said Ms. Laughlin Bloom, “to kind of meet Keith right at the entrance.” She laughed, as if this were in fact a kind of spiritual homecoming for the artist.

That set of original Polaroids is one of those archival pieces that have never before been on view, though reproductions were included in the show in Vienna. “Most of them have titles that are associated with either a holiday or a day in Keith’s life, so it has a documentary feel.”

Another major addition to the show in Brooklyn is a set of 31 of the actual “subway drawings,” drawings Haring made on the walls of New York’s subway system, which has been loaned from a private collection.

Nestled among the display of subway drawings is the show’s crown jewel, a 23-foot Sumi ink scroll painting, Everybody Knows Where Meat Comes From, It Comes From the Store, for which the museum has had to extend a wall. The effect, said Ms. Laughlin Bloom, is of “almost an urban architecture within the exhibition space. You feel like you’re almost in the presence of a skyscraper form. We’re just getting the sense that it’s bringing the city—which was such an important medium for Haring—into our spaces.”

The show includes large collages and exhibition announcements applied directly to the gallery walls; an installation inspired by Haring’s “paper environments,” where he would cover entire rooms in collages lithographs, and drawings, and even hang works from the ceiling; and his famous photos of parties, nightclubs and performance art.

The show promises to reveal an artist who was in many ways ahead of his time. In one of his early diary entries, Haring wrote, “Do computers have any sense of aesthetics? Can an aesthetic pattern be programmed and fed into a computer so that it reasons and makes decisions based on a given aesthetic?” His own work proves the power of the human touch.

rjovanovic@observer.com

]]>

Keith Haring. "Untitled," 1981. Courtesy Keith Haring Foundation.

Keith Haring, who died in 1990, was a quintessential New York street artist and is one of the most recognizable figures in 20th century art, known for his dense colorful murals, his AIDS activism, and his Pop Shop. How many revelations about his career can yet another exhibition of his work possibly bring to light? Very many, according to Raphaela Platow, curator of a survey of his early work that opens at the Brooklyn Museum on March 16.

“The Keith Haring who did a lot of video. The Keith Haring who curated many shows,” said Ms. Platow, who is director and chief curator of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, where the exhibition was on view in the fall. There are sides of Haring that we don’t know. “He organized 30 shows in four years. And he wrote his own press releases. They’re hilarious. Then he moved to an entire phase where he did nothing but word-based pieces. Works based on words. Different iterations. Lots of collages. Video works that he created and that are about the variability of words, inspired by linguistics.”

“Keith Haring: 1978-1982” presents work from the first four, very raw years of Haring’s career—before he traveled the world, designed a jacket for a Madonna video, went on MTV, and painted Grace Jones’s body; before the Absolut and Swatch ads. It’s the first large-scale exhibition to focus exclusively on the period that began when he came to New York from Pittsburgh to study at the School of Visual Arts, and ended when he created the images that would make him famous, and commercial. The show comes to New York at a time of increased interest in street art. Last year saw the wildly popular Art in the Streets exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, curated by Jeffrey Deitch; it was planned to travel to the Brooklyn Museum, but the museum pulled out for financial reasons. The Haring show may serve as a kind of replacement; he’s considered the spiritual godfather to many of today’s street artists.

In organizing the show, Ms. Platow started with questions she had about Mr. Haring’s work. “I wondered how he got to the point where he could create these amazing large figurative pieces by the time he was in his mid-20s,” she said.

A look at Haring’s journals reveals that there is much to work with in this period. There are examples of his experimentation with words, and the results of cut-up exercises he did à la William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, who were both major influences at the time, as well as examples of gouache cut-outs he did when exploring Matisse’s practice. He documented his artistic breakthroughs. An entry from Nov. 7, 1978, reads, “I have just completed another landmark (for me, that is) painting. It is the first time I ever tried to utilize both arms to control two brushes.” Interspersed with the writing are small drawings of penises, pyramids, dogs and scenes of New York City.

And Haring was an avid video maker. “He recorded his own very performative creations of these abstract patterns sometimes on the floor of his studio or the wall of the studio, literally covered the entire space and videotaped it,” said Ms. Platow. “He considered the video the work of art, not the drawing itself.” His early experimental video works explored the intersection between drawing, space, movement and language. In Phonics (1980), Mr. Haring had his friends, including the artist Kenny Scharf, intone various phonemes, chosen at random. In Machines, he shot a close-up of a mouth formulating sound signals based on Morse code.

It was in 1981 that the imagery now most associated with Haring first made an appearance in his art—the barking dog, the “radiant baby,” the flying saucer, the pyramid.

Some of the pieces in the Brooklyn show, such as a few examples of the early drawings and the word pieces, were included in the Whitney Museum retrospective in 1997, as well as gallery exhibitions like the Barbara Gladstone show during the summer of 2011, shortly after Gladstone began representing his estate, but the Brooklyn show is the largest one to focus on the artist’s formative years, and there are, Ms. Platow said, good reasons to bring the early material out of the vault right now. Her inspiration to look more deeply into Haring’s work came eight years ago, when she was curating an exhibition of street artist Barry McGee at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, and first learned what a significant influence Haring has had on a younger generation. “Like so many artists who draw inspiration from urban culture and the street, [Mr. McGee] was really inspired and informed by Keith Haring. And here I was, a German. I had never even heard of [the term] ‘campy’ before.”

Looking for ways to shed new light on Haring’s career led Ms. Platow to the Keith Haring Foundation, which is in New York and has a warehouse in New Jersey, where she went through boxes and boxes of archival materials. “I went to the warehouse and we opened crates that hadn’t been opened since the late ’70s. We rolled out these amazing large pieces on paper.”

According to Julia Gruen, the foundation’s executive director, Ms. Platow’s visit was “a serendipitous moment.” The foundation was, she said, just finishing work on a monograph that Rizzoli published in 2008, with contributions from then art dealer Jeffrey Deitch and his gallery director, Suzanne Geiss, both of whom had extensive experience with Haring’s art.

It was in the course of putting together that monograph that Ms. Gruen began to realize that the materials should be exhibited. “They should not just be reproduced in books,” she said. “They should be seen.”

Before taking the exhibition to Cincinnati, where it finished its run at the Contemporary Arts Center in September, Ms. Platow debuted it, in 2010, at the Kunsthalle Wien, in Vienna, Austria. It was a huge hit—the second-most visited show since the Kunsthalle opened in 1992—proving that Haring has fans the world over. “I think the fact that the show opened in Vienna is a testament to the universality of what he created,” said Tricia Laughlin Bloom, the project curator for the show’s Brooklyn presentation. “His work really speaks across time, space and cultural divides, and that bears out when you look at his exposure internationally.”

People in Europe have heard about the Pop Shop, said Ms. Platow, “and they’ve heard about the East Village.”

Haring may have had his immediate audience in the nightclubs of New York, but, while he was alive, the aesthetic appreciation of his work was more pronounced overseas. “Even in Keith’s lifetime, his work was far more appreciated in Europe,” said Ms. Gruen. “And far more accepted. Those things that caused art connoisseurs to throw their hands up here in America just seemed like no problem in Europe.”

To give the presentation a hometown angle, the Brooklyn Museum has augmented the show with additional archival materials from the foundation as well as works from local private collections according to Ms. Laughlin Bloom.

“We’ll have a set of 20 great Polaroid portraits that Haring did between 1979 and ’82,” said Ms. Laughlin Bloom, “to kind of meet Keith right at the entrance.” She laughed, as if this were in fact a kind of spiritual homecoming for the artist.

That set of original Polaroids is one of those archival pieces that have never before been on view, though reproductions were included in the show in Vienna. “Most of them have titles that are associated with either a holiday or a day in Keith’s life, so it has a documentary feel.”

Another major addition to the show in Brooklyn is a set of 31 of the actual “subway drawings,” drawings Haring made on the walls of New York’s subway system, which has been loaned from a private collection.

Nestled among the display of subway drawings is the show’s crown jewel, a 23-foot Sumi ink scroll painting, Everybody Knows Where Meat Comes From, It Comes From the Store, for which the museum has had to extend a wall. The effect, said Ms. Laughlin Bloom, is of “almost an urban architecture within the exhibition space. You feel like you’re almost in the presence of a skyscraper form. We’re just getting the sense that it’s bringing the city—which was such an important medium for Haring—into our spaces.”

The show includes large collages and exhibition announcements applied directly to the gallery walls; an installation inspired by Haring’s “paper environments,” where he would cover entire rooms in collages lithographs, and drawings, and even hang works from the ceiling; and his famous photos of parties, nightclubs and performance art.

The show promises to reveal an artist who was in many ways ahead of his time. In one of his early diary entries, Haring wrote, “Do computers have any sense of aesthetics? Can an aesthetic pattern be programmed and fed into a computer so that it reasons and makes decisions based on a given aesthetic?” His own work proves the power of the human touch.

rjovanovic@observer.com

]]> http://galleristny.com/2012/02/portrait-of-keith-haring-as-a-young-man-brooklyn-museum-focuses-on-early-years/feed/ 4 jhanasobserver 08 Keith Haring http://galleristny.com/2011/11/new-historical-society-building-features-keith-haring-ceiling/#comments Fri, 11 Nov 2011 09:57:49 -0400 http://galleristny.com/2011/11/new-historical-society-building-features-keith-haring-ceiling/ Dan Duray http://www.galleristny.com/?p=4452

(Photo: James Leynse, New York Magazine)

How'd we miss this? The New York Times review of the first show at the newly renovated New York Historical society notes in passing that the new building features part of the ceiling from Keith Haring's "Pop Shop."

Pop Shop, of course, was the name of the store on Lafayette where the artist sold his designs and memorabilia. There were two locations, the one in Soho and another in Tokyo, and both featured murals in Haring's signature style that covered every surface.

The New York shop closed in 2005 and a New York magazine story about the closing featured Amy Cappellazzo dismissing the notion that the ceiling would ever be sold, saying, "I hope it has a life in some place like the New-York Historical Society." Always ahead of the curve, that Cappellazzo.

From the second season of "Work of Art."

It was a lively atmosphere on the 16th floor penthouse of the artsy Roger Smith hotel in midtown last Wednesday. Some 30 people had crammed into a small library and tucked themselves in behind white tablecloths to sip bourbon and watch the giant TV that had been set up at the front of the room. There were artists and art critics and, crucially, bingo. They were there to mock the TV show Work of Art during its second season premiere, or possibly celebrate it. With such an event, it’s hard to tell.

The bingo sheets described various outlandish things that might happen during the episode, and you’d check them off as they happened in real time, hoping to score a row. The scenarios were specific enough that you knew the staff had to have seen a screener beforehand, but it was still slightly unbelievable that all of these absurdities would come to pass in a single episode. One or two seemed reasonable, but “Someone uses a power tool,” “The deaf artist’s sign language translator makes it into the shot,” and “Jerry Saltz rolls his eyes at Mary Ellen Mark”?

The first “bingo” was declared 10 minutes into the show.

“I don’t own a television,” said Danika Druttman, who works for the hotel and organized the event. “The thing is, I’ve seen the English version with Charles Saatchi on airplanes and it was fun!”-—she referred to School of Saatchi, which aired in the U.K. in 2009—“but the art world was a bit snobby about it, like, ‘We’re so above this.’ Then here, the American version, it I feel like it got a better reception.”

Her assessment would seem sound. The Times concluded in their initial review, that “Work of Art works,” and the near-constant coverage on art blogs made the phrase “world-famous Brooklyn museum” seem a little less derision-worthy, or perhaps like a self-fulfilling prophecy. After asking The Observer whether or not Mr. Saltz, New York magazine’s art critic, was still on the show, the critic and MFA professor Dave Hickey offered another explanation for the positive press of the first season.

“Jerry’s going to lose all of his friends on this one,” he said, laughing. “Because all the critics I know in New York were being nice to him in the hopes that they would get to be one of the next critics on the show! People in New York place a high value on being on TV and getting to meet Steve Martin and things like that,” he chuckled. “It’s a sick fucking culture.”

Grab your helmets! Work of Art is back. And now that it’s something of an institution, will it ever win the art world’s hearts and minds, or are we just entering the next phase of a long war of attrition?

“I hate the show sometimes, too,” Mr. Saltz told WNYC last week, pre-empting the requisite wave of bile. “I do think that sometimes people need to get a grip, however. This isn’t a billionaire collector flying a millionaire artist to Venice to party down on a private yacht. This isn’t a billion dollars spent at auction for pieces of drivel. I think that the show may be a light thing when heavy things are happening, but I don’t think it’s destructive.”

If the show relied on people like Mr. Saltz and guest judges like Ms. Marks to grant it legitimacy, in its second season it has a momentum of its own. Everyone seems to know what it is—an extended on-camera MFA, with goofier-than-usual assignments, for artists that are possibly talented and definitely attractive. To expect more would be to set oneself up for disappointment. Moreover, its detractors have almost got it out of their system.

“I think I fully exhausted any thoughts on Work of Art,” wrote the artist William Powhida, who has blustered about the show in his work, via email. “Anna Wintour said it best when asked about Kayne West’s recent folly in Paris, ‘Ask someone else.’”

Just as Mr. West’s Twitter postings are now unremarkable no matter how ridiculous they are, there’s something to be said for extremity, and though it’s still early in the second season, Work of Art seems to have embraced its reality TV show status. It’s still early in the season, but the artists participating this year seem to be cut from cloth that is, if not the same as other reality stars,’ at least closer to that cloth than last year’s contestants. The best example here would be the season two contestant the Sucklord—a 42-year-old artist who has sold works at Christie’s and Phillips, and whose work is relatively vital compared to some of the other contestants’ offerings, but again, and this is definitely worth repeating: he calls himself the Sucklord.

“It is true that this season the artists seem to be a little less self-serious,” dealer and judge Bill Powers told The Observer. The Sucklord, he said, challenges biases in the art world in a way they weren’t able to do in the first season. “I think it’s better that he’s on the second season, because we needed to establish what the show is before we could start testing the boundaries of what art can be.”

For the people who decry the absurdity of the challenges and the punishing schedule in which they have to be accomplished, this can only be seen as a good thing. An oil painting based on thrift store tchotchke that has to be done in 12 hours? That’s a bit tricky. Some kind of graffiti-esque drawing on glass that makes no fewer than three people reference Keith Haring? Doable!

Plus, there’s a welcome distance between a working artist and a guy who makes action figures. During the premiere one woman was described at the bottom of the screen as a “figurative painter” and a woman at The Observer’s table—an accomplished, extremely talented figurative painter — bristled noticeably.

People like the Sucklord aren’t just there to test boundaries—they’re accessible, and that accessibility could be another major defense of the show. It offers the audience a glimpse of the art world, an exclusionary, often arcane-seeming place they would never otherwise see or perhaps even have any interest in seeing. Mr. Powers pointed out that Will Cotton’s appearance last season may have served as a compelling introduction to contemporary painting for fans of his Katy Perry album cover.

“When I agreed to do the show,” Simon de Pury told The Observer, “I did it not in any way for the art world, but because I thought this would allow for a wider audience to see what it is to create a work of art, or judge a work of art because there is a kind of misconception or a wrong assumption that art is for a privileged group of insiders.”

You’d think that such a sentiment might win some allies in the art world, like the acerbic critic Charlie Finch, who’s says he’s never seen the show but, when we called him, reminisced about the days when secretaries would head to MoMA on their lunch breaks. Doesn’t the show, on some level, bring us closer to those days?

“It makes art look like a trivial stupid little made-up game instead of the highest form of human creation!” Mr Finch shot back. “Oh yes, that’s really, really great. That will get them going to the museums.”

“It’s like they’re trying to turn art into some TV shit,” Professor Hickey said, adding that it reminded him of something he experienced with the 1960s Raymond Burr detective show Ironside. “It was the first TV show that had hippies on it and we had a party to celebrate the death of hippiedom, because all of a sudden hippies had come to TV. Artists don’t listen to advice, artists are not into being instructed. These kids, they’ve got makeup on!”

Since Work of Art is by no means the first art-based TV show, this accessibility or at least its bid for popularity, would seem to be the most offensive part of the show, for those inclined to be offended by it. Even when it’s entertaining, art on television has a long history of being didactic, from 1969’s Civilisation with Kenneth Clark, to Robert Hughes’s The Shock of the New in 1980, to Sister Wendy Beckett, whose habitted lectures on the Renaissance still grace PBS every now and then. And then, of course, there was the Wild West of cable access, where, in New York in the ’80s, Warhol acolyte Glenn O’Brian hosted his TV Party, a call-in show featuring downtown talent (Warhol himself eventually made his way to MTV) and Jaime Davidovich’s avant-garde The Live! Show behaved as if it didn’t care whether or not anyone was watching. These shows were no more representative of the art world than Work of Art, but then they never claimed to be about finding the “next great artist.”

Aaron Baker, art curator for Playboy and a photographer, turned down an offer from Bravo to audition for a spot last year and this year didn’t return an email asking if he wanted to try this season. He said no television show would ever be able to accurately represent the art world as he’s known it.

“Not the way that we do television,” Mr. Baker said. “But that’s not what it wants to be. Everybody wants it to be Keeping Up With the Kardashians with palette knives, they want it to be cute people involved in silly dramatic scenarios, they want shots of these kids in tighty whites being rousted from bed and dragged to Times Square for a challenge.

“Though I would say that’s a fairly accurate portrayal of art school, actually,” he added.

The way ahead for Work of Art would seem to be the direction in which they are already headed: have the show be nominally about the art world, but not at all for it. Everyone’s going to be watching anyway.

dduray@observer.com

Cindy Sherman, "Untitled," 1981. (Photo courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures)

If you've worked in, or reported on, the contemporary art world long enough, you're familiar with the idea of the obsessive collector. This is the collector who just can't stop acquiring artworks, and who has built his or her house to accommodate the collection, adding rooms that are designated as galleries, rooms from which furniture has been all but banished.

An exhibition in Miami this December, "Home Alone," will take that idea to its logical extreme.

Longtime contemporary art collector Adam Sender, 42, founder of the hedge fund Exis Capital Management, and his wife Lenore will put a  portion of their contemporary art holdings on view for the first time in an exhibition in a private North Miami residence during Art Basel Miami Beach. Organized by Sender Collection curator Sarah Aibel, the exhibition will present a fictional scenario in which a collection has grown so huge that it has forced the collector and his family to pack up and leave. The art has literally taken over the house.

The setting for this exhibition is a house that Mr. Sender, who also maintains a residence in Sag Harbor, N.Y., bought in North Miami last year, but then decided he wanted to sell. Mr. Sender and his family moved into a new house nearby, leaving this one empty. So, while the house is on the market, he decided to give Ms. Aibel the run of it, curatorially speaking, and open it up to art audiences during Art Basel Miami Beach, the annual art fair extravaganza that has hit Miami every December since 2002.

The Observer caught up with Ms. Aibel by phone a couple weeks ago, when she was at the house, planning and beginning to install the show.

"My thought process at first was, I was fighting against the idea that this was a residential space," she said. "I wanted to turn it into a white box. But it's a residential space. Period. So I wanted to use that to its advantage."

She installed some 70 artworks throughout the entire 5,000-square-foot home, including in closets and bathrooms. The exhibition features a number of provocative pieces installed in provocative places; a highlight is certain to be Richard Prince's racy Spiritual America—a reproduction of a famously controversial photograph of Brooke Shields as a child, heavily made-up and naked, standing in a bathtub—hanging in one of the house's bathrooms, right above the bathtub. (That's not the only clever placement: Also look for Vito Acconci's Seedbed, documentation of a 1972 performance the artist did that involved masturbating under a piece of plywood, placed underneath a sloped ceiling.)

The pieces on view were acquired by the Senders as early as when they first began collecting, in 1998. There are works by young artists like Rashid Johnson, Frank Benson, Diana Al-Hadid, Jim Lambie and Urs Fischer, as well as more established ones like Sarah Lucas, Matthew Barney, Chris Ofili, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Mike Kelley, Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman. Many of the pieces have never before been on public view in the United States.

There has been some anticipation surrounding the Senders' contemporary art holdings going on view. A few years ago, Mr. Sender, who has loaned pieces to institutions like the Guggenheim and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, had plans to put the collection, which reportedly numbers around 800 works, in a private exhibition space. He considered purchasing a disused church near his home in Sag Harbor, then decided to instead become a board member of the nearby Parrish Art Museum. In June, he opened his Hamptons home, where major artworks by Urs Fischer, Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Sol LeWitt and other artists were installed, for a cocktail party in support of that museum.

The Miami house will be open at select times during Art Basel Miami Beach, for private brunch receptions on the mornings of the fair, and for a private evening reception. Along with events hosted by other Miami collectors, such as Martin Margulies, Debra and Dennis Scholl and the Rubell Family, the Senders' exhibition is included on the VIP schedule of the fair.

From the sound of it, this will be a refreshing display. "How many shows do you see in white boxes?" Ms. Aibel asked The Observer rhetorically. "You go to collection visits in homes, but when have you ever seen a show that has taken over a residence? It seemed like an interesting angle."