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Article translated by Amritee Mahabir
The “Contemporary Art” exhibit held on April 2nd 2008 at New York’s auction house Sotheby’s, ended with a total of 12,580,675 dollars. It was an extraordinary sale that returned to showcase 459 lots of high aesthetic quality spanning from pre-seventies art right up to the present day. Of the various lots that chalked up most success was Untitled by Keith Haring that gave an initial estimate of 60-80 million dollars, and selling for 217,000 dollars. It is a beautiful heart shaped piece by Haring in which his typical little figures are dominant. They are stylised figures that “hug”, “love” and “dance” struck by rays that in turn radiate and renders them active, a creative piece that is in turn, communicable. An entire book wouldn’t be enough to translate Keith Haring’s philosophy and artistic poetry into words. It is not often that a historical moment can be narrated through the life and works of an artist. But he’s proved this theory wrong. He personifies New York in the seventies and at the start of the eighties encompassing its noise, smart inventions and luxury, the frenetic movements between a factory and a fashion house. It was down to him that art began to leave galleries and invade the streets as had never before occurred. Haring expresses immediate and primitive signs reminiscent of pop art and at the same time a fantastic miracle that he perhaps didn’t realise anymore. He was more than simply a graffiti artist or a decorator; he was skilled and fantastic. He was an all round artist, the son of a cartoonist but also influenced by Maya, Japanese pictograms and Picasso. He was an artist who instead of working with usual and traditional mediums, had chosen to work with sprays, ink and paint, which only goes to show his radical position. This was a delicate choice, a detachment from noble art traditions allowing his images to be universally communicated. Unusually, he was quite political whether in his choice of locations or in the boldness of his contents. As time passed, he promoted decisive campaigns during those years: against Aids, against drugs and against the discrimination that still stands towards homosexuals. He did all this with an untiring rhythm, filling up wall by wall with designs without asking for bureaucratic permission and without having prepared any kind of draft. And perhaps it was exactly the immediacy of his expression, the fact that in a certain sense, he had it all at hand, that his talent was not fully valued. Because during the ten years of Keith Haring’s career, he was highlighted more as a media and political phenomenon rather than as an artist. Leading an exaggerated lifestyle, crushed at only 31 years of age by Aids, this young and gaunt artist who lived in a visionary naïve and violent universe, until the beginning of his brief artistic activity was launched within the art market. His works begun to appear at auctions around 1984 and from then on there were many appearances including Untitled (1982) of May 2007 at Christie’s in New York which was Haring’s personal record: from an estimate of 800,000-1,200,000 dollars, it was sold for 2,840,000 dollars (2,092,235 euros). As Keith Haring himself writes in 1987 regarding the value of his paintings we can better understand how things ran economically with this artist: “Unfortunately, many people who bought my works at the start of 1982, did it as a mere investment. It didn’t matter if it was to their taste or not, providing that they could profit from the money. I thought that a lot of these people were assholes at first; it’s just that I have ingenuously sold them works that were not necessarily of high quality. Now they are reviewing everything earning a lot more from it than I myself have been able to originally gain”.
Tags: Keith Haring
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