"The public has a right to art.
"The public is being ignored by most of contemporary artists.
"The public needs art and it is the responsibility of a "self-proclaimed artist" to realize the public needs art and not to make bourgeois art for the few and ignore the masses.
"Art is for everybody. To think that they (the public) do not appreciate art because they don't understand and therefore become alienated from [sic] may mean that the artist is the one who doesn't understand or appreciate art and is thriving in the "self-proclaimed knowledge of art" that is actually bullshit.
"Art can be a positive influence towards a society of individuals.
"Art can be a destructive element and an aid to the take-over of the "mass-identity" society.
"Art must be considered by the artists as well as the public.
"The public will not, however, say what they want for fear of being un-educated or not understanding art. Therefore the responsibility rests..."
Keith Haring, journal page, October 1978
He was a geeky kid from small-town Pennsylviania who spent his early teen years in the Jesus Movement. At the age of twenty, he moved to New York to study art.
He was cerebral, radically embodied, and hypersexual, all at the same time. He was, quite literally, a fucking saint.
He died of AIDS in 1990 at the age of 31. His last work was an altarpiece, two versions of which are now in Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.
Right now, his work is on show at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. I was lucky enough to be there when multiple school groups were coming through, in waves of excitement rolling off the kids from an alternative arts-based high school, and occasional shrieks of amazement at the unabashedly sexual imagery scattered through the exhibition. (Like they'd never seen such things on restroom walls and the back covers of textbooks--but, I'm figuring, never expected to see in a Temple of Culture.) The noisiest and most joyful gallery visit I'll ever experience.
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