Keith Haring Quotes

Art should be something that liberates your soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further.

Nothing is important...so everything is important.

Children know something that most people have forgotten.

You have to be objective about money to use it fairly. It doesn't make you any better or any more useful than any other person. Even if you use your money to help people...that doesn't make you better than somebody who has no money but is sympathetic and genuinely loving to fellow human beings.

Most of the time they buy what other people buy. They move in great schools, like bluefish, all identical. There is safety in numbers. If one wants Schnabel, they all want Schnabel, if one buys a Keith Haring, two hundred Keith Harings will be sold.

Good and Evil are very hard to explain or understand. I'm sure that evil exists, but it is hard to isolate. Good and evil are intertwined and impossible to separate. They are not completely opposites and in fact are often one and the same.

Touching people’s lives in a positive way is as close as I can get to an idea of religion.

I am a necessary part of an important search to which there is no end.

See, when I paint, it is an experience that, at its best, is transcending reality.

Keith Haring wrote " You see that's why I work like a dog and I worked like a dog all my life. I am not interested in the academic status of what I am doing because my problem is my own transformation. Thats the reason also why, when people say. " Well you thought this a few years ago and now you say something else," my answer is[laughter]" well, do you think that I have worked like that all those years and not be changed?" This transformation of ones self by ones own knowledge is,I think something rather close to the aesthetic experience. Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting.

The public has a right to art The public is being ignored by most contemporary artists. ... Art is for everybody. ... I am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible with as many different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached. The viewer creates the reality, the meaning, the conception of the piece.

Art is life. Life is art. The importance of both is over-exaggerated as well as misunderstood.

Nothing is an end because it always can be a basis for something new and different.

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.

I only wish that I could have more confidence and try to forget all my silly preconceptions, misconceptions, and just live. Just live. Just. Live. Just live till I die.

I am not a beginning. I am not an end. I am a link in a chain.

This, I feel, is the advantage to creating art at this point in time: When we realize that we are temporary, we are facing our self-destruction, we are realizing our fate and we must confront it. Art is the only sensible primal response to an outlook of possible destruction (obliteration).

I am becoming very hard on the outside and even softer on the inside.

Poems do not necessarily need words. Words do not necessarily make poems.

Art has no meaning because it has many meanings, infinite meanings. Art is different for every individual, and is definable only by the given individual.

Art is for everybody. To think that they—the public—do not appreciate art because they don’t understand it, and to continue to make art that they don’t understand and therefore become alienated from, may mean that the artist is the one who doesn’t understand or appreciate art and is thriving in this “self-proclaimed knowledge of art” that is actually bullshit.

There is one question George is asked about life and art and which is more important, and George said art is more important because it is immortal. This struck a very deep note inside me. For I am quite aware of the chance that I have or will have AIDS. The odds are very great and, in fact, the symptoms already exist. My friends are dropping like flies and I know in my heart that it is only divine intervention that has kept me alive this long. I don’t know if I have five months or five years, but I know my days are numbered. This is why my activities and projects are so important now. To do as much as possible as quickly as possible. I’m sure that what will live on after I die is important enough to make sacrifices of my personal luxury and leisure time. Work is all I have and art is more important than life.

As in all things: Time will clarify the events that are presently unclear.

Risks are what make the difference between new ideas and re-worked old ideas.

I think I was born an artist. I think I have a responsibility to live up to that. I’ve spent my life up to this point trying to find out just what that responsibility

Money is the opposite of magic. Art is magic. The

I don’t really know exactly what I want to be, but I know what I don’t want to be.

I am filled with a certain kind of doubt about my role in the world. But that does not stop me from participating in the world. It only keeps me from expecting something from the world. It

People, I realize, cannot live like a patch of grass. They could, I suppose, at one time, but we are so far removed from that time that it is hard to conceive. People can, however, live their lives with the realization that they are constantly changing, products of their changing environment and changing situations, and time. They can live, at least, in harmony with the knowledge and co-exist with it instead of working against it.

Art will never leave me and never should. So as I go into the next part of the trip I hope it will be more creative and more work involved and less talk and more doing, seeing, learning, being, loving, feeling, maybe less feeling, and just work my ass off, ’cause that, my friend, is where it’s at!

July 7, 1986: Montreux It is only now that I realize the importance of a biography. I mean I always have realized that I enjoy to read (and have learned many things from) the biographies of artists whom I admire. It is probably my main source of education. In the beginning of my “career” (what an awful word) I was misled by a teacher who thought the things I was writing to be pretentious and self important. Years later, when I read those things I wrote in 1978, it didn’t seem so pretentious for almost everything I wrote about “wanting to do,” I actually did in the four or five years that followed.

March 28, 1987: Today I read in the New York Times that all of the officers who killed Michael Stewart were again dismissed of charges. Continually dismissed, but in their minds they will never forget. They know they killed him. They will never forget his screams, his face, his blood. The must live with that forever. I hope in their next life they are tortured like they tortured him. They should be birds captured early in life, put in cages, purchased by a fat, smelly, ugly lady who keeps them in a small dirty cage up near the ceiling while all day she cooks bloody sausages and the blood spatters their cage and the frying fat burns their matted feathers and they can nerf escape the horrible fumes of her burnt meat. One day the cage will fall to the ground and a big fat ugly cat will kick them about, play with them like a toy, and slowly kill them and leave their remains to be accidentally stepped on by the big fat pig lady who can’t see her own feet because of her huge sagging tits. An eye for an eye … I’m not afraid of anything I’d ever done. Not ashamed of anything.

Art should be something that liberates your soul, provokes the imagination, and encourages people to go further.

Inspire kids to dream big, work hard, give back!

Inspire kids to think big, work hard, give back!

crucial way for Haring’s career by Rene Ricard in an article in Artforum in December 1981 titled—and forever dubbing Haring as—“The Radiant Child.” Having appeared in several 1960s Warhol films, including Chelsea

credibility.” The catalog, the show, like much else in Haring’s career, was a group effort. “It was never

what it turned out to be at all. There are equal amounts of white, Black, and Puerto Rican graffiti writers, or Chinese or whatever . . . Most of them grew up in the city. If I had grown up in the city, I probably would have been doing it also.” He met a few female writers—Lady

director of “It’s a Reagan World,” a preposterous and giddy fake lifestyle spread in the SoHo Weekly News. “We were fully convinced Reagan was going to start a nuclear war with Russia,” Magnuson wrote of a palpable quickening of the pulse downtown, “so we

creating at a frenetic pace and living every day like it was our last.” Photographed by Tseng Kwong Chi, the SoHo News piece presented Keith Haring and Dany Johnson as “the Bothroids,” a yuppy suburban couple in L.L.Bean–style fashion, in front of their

with was Beyond Words, billed as a survey of “what Graffiti has created and how its influence continues.” Opening night, April 9, was a “Music Jam,” deejayed by Afrika Bambaataa, with “some of the top rap vocalists of the South Bronx scene.” Keith invited Fab 5 Freddy

a graffiti convention.” As Brathwaite recalled, “Nobody had heard or seen anything like it. These clubs were 95% white on any given night, so when you had a lot of young African American males and Puerto Ricans in the mix it just changed the dynamics—

About the time the two of them chanced upon Paradise Garage, they also made their way one balmy August evening through the East Village beyond Avenue B, one of the most desolate neighborhoods in the city, wandering around, hoping to score some dope. “I was just

content in the paintings, though Haring had been dealing with apocalypse, nuclear disarmament, authoritarian control, and technological manipulation since his first show at Club 57 in 1980, albeit in deceptively

Apollinaire, Max Jacob. With Keith, there was the Keith Haring Band. I traveled around with the whole Keith party. He was a real energizer who built community around him.” Their collaboration—and

coincided with (or caused) a definite shift in the social pattern of the last two years. . . . Fun is the apotheosis of what Edit deAk has called ‘Clubism,’ but just happens to be taking place in an art gallery.” Keith did not need to show his work at Fun Gallery. His big opening

crash into the basement. “The opening attracted a remarkable mix of Puerto Rican kids from the neighborhood and the elite of the art world,” said Jeffrey Deitch. Haring’s simple invite was a nod

as well. “I’d never seen a crowd like that in a gallery,” Donald Baechler says. “I remember Edit deAk showing up for the opening. She was writing for Artforum. At that moment, she and Rene Ricard

Rauschenberg. Yet most startling was the fusion of people from the club scene, the art scene, the graffiti scene—three or four thousand in a party atmosphere. “I had girls serving Coca-Cola in little bottles, because

Evening News segment on Haring, introduced by Dan Rather and narrated by Charles Osgood, that aired on October 20. A TV crew trailed the artist, in round horn-rimmed glasses and his sleeveless bright yellow T-shirt printed

Patti. Come home. Come on. She’ll be straight with you.” (Basquiat spent most of his opening in a corner, arguing with his new girlfriend, Madonna, known for her performance at Haoui Montaug’s No Entiendes cabaret at Danceteria.) Yet the point of Ricard’s piece was

Fun was entirely in the spirit of “Clubism.” Said Haring, “My exhibition at Fun Gallery was really a reference to the whole Hip-Hop culture,” as he and LA II “bombed” the gallery in spray paint

Haring became familiar enough with the Soul Artists community that he was able to correct misconceptions when he began giving interviews to some downtown writers: “The stereotyped idea of a graffiti writer is a Black or Puerto Rican kid from the ghetto. It’s not really

On the evening of January 20, 1981, Club 57 in exile at the Mudd Club “celebrated” the inauguration

Kooning Drawing. Like many in Haring’s circle, Cortez, having grown up in the suburbs of Chicago as “Jim Curtis,” invented his tag of a street name. His purposely aslant show at P.S. 1 of more than 600 works by 119 artists, with no frames or labels, was designed to feel more

conceptualism. (Of the seventies, Cortez said in an interview at the time, “You’d go to openings and find white walls, white people, and minimal white art.”) Yet none of the young Mary Boone painters had appeared in New York/New Wave, conceived by Cortez as “neo-pop,

exploration of the cross-influences of punk music, club life, and art and the mixing of high and low mastered in the sixties by the presiding genius of the show, Andy Warhol. “Keith and Jean fell outside that eighties painting thing,” Cortez says, “and were more connected with

the radical inventions like public art and graffiti. When we think of the eighties, we think more about the music than the art in popular culture. We think about Madonna. Keith and Jean were right there with Madonna, Bowie, Eno. That may be the core of the eighties. I

Mass had never been the ideal boss for Keith or for any of the Club 57 crew. “We were young kids who didn’t like authority,” Magnuson said, “and he was an authority figure.” Brathwaite felt that “Steve Mass treated Keith so bad. I remember one day he was going to be paid. Steve

Haring tried to reflect this mix of the raunchy and the slick in a series of drawings begun in the loft on March 30, 1981, the day Ronald Reagan was shot and wounded by John Hinckley Jr., who was

Another introduction made by Diego Cortez at the time was to the Italian painter Francesco Clemente, who was in New York City for the first time in the spring of 1981, staying with his family

pegged to Kenny Scharf’s second exhibition at Fun Gallery—that appeared in Artforum in November 1982. Ricard was not a neutral critic. He had dropped by Fun Gallery each morning for a coffee and had convinced Basquiat to show at the gallery, saying, “Jean, chill

He had been reading The Electronic Revolution, in which Burroughs counsels the scrambling of news media messaging to resist “brain wave control” and to liberate consciousness.

Adding a few more hours to their already late nights, the director of the Mudd Club, Steve Mass, at about the same moment, began

rooms held photography and artwork by rock stars (David Byrne, Chris Stein, Alan Vega); photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe (of Patti Smith) and Nan Goldin; works by the venerable (William Burroughs and Ray Johnson); and one gallery devoted to twenty artists associated with

of Ronald Reagan by holding its own Inaugural Ball. This convex-mirror version of the formal ball being held that same evening at the floodlit Kennedy Center on the Potomac was dreamed up, of course, by Ann Magnuson, who, the month before, was also the art

Club 57, the first exhibit to acknowledge the club’s importance in the art scene. (Also enshrined in a timely memorial of photographs was John Lennon.) Haring had ten or fifteen works in the show, including a long scroll of abstract, curvilinear shapes that Cortez

covered in Plexiglas and laid across the floor for everyone to walk over. The final, prime gallery was given over to Jean-Michel Basquiat, with fifteen paintings on canvas, wood, paper, or steel, in paint and crayon. New York/New Wave

1981, the year Haring showed up, Levan took an obscure new release, “Heartbeat” by Taana Gardner, and by slowing down the beat in his club mix to a heavy ninety-eight beats per minute and letting the previous

sexy scenarios. She was revolving around the hip-hop scene and hung out at the Roxy, the main downtown dance floor for break dancing, the “home of hip-hop.” “Keith and I are sort of two sides of the same coin,” Madonna said. “And we were very

I realized I could probably start living from my work. I also realized I didn’t ever have to do menial work again. And so, I quit. I think that because of the graffiti show, I went out with glory. I didn’t know it then, but working at the Mudd Club would be my last job where I would ever

a Keith Haring wristwatch,

But I also understand why Steve, who'd sewn his share of panels over the years, would fly into a rage as the end approached: 'And don't put me in that fucking quilt!' Being of a mind to have his body dumped instead on the White House lawn. The guilt had begun to seem too passive, even too nice, letting the war criminals off the hook and providing the media with far too easy a wrap up. Much neater than trying to unravel the Gordian knot of AIDS activism, the Byzantine infighting and turf protection, the in-your-face bad manners of those who wouldn't go quietly. The quilted dead made for prettier sound bites, especially effective at zeroing in on the "innocent" victims, the kids and the hemophiliacs. At the same time there began to appear a certain overview phenomenon under the general rubric of AIDS-and-the-Arts. Typically these were hand-wringing accounts of the impact of so much cultured dying, lamenting for instance the White Way silence left by Michael Bennett, the songs unsung. This litany was something of a mixed bag, bringing under the same umbrella the likes of Way Bandy and Halston, Miss Kitty and Keith Haring. Though it was surely true what Fran Lebowitz so scathingly observed If you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture, you would be pretty much left with 'Let's Make a Deal.' these roundups of the arts tended to foster in the general populace ever new heights of Not me.

He decided to call his birthday event the Party of Life, implying a celebration not just of his own birth but of everyone’s birth and of life itself.

It wouldn’t matter if you lived until you were seventy-five, there would still be things that you wished you would have accomplished. You could work for several lifetimes. If I could clone myself there will still be too much work to do, even if there were five of me. And there are no regrets, really. Part of the reason that I’m not having trouble facing the reality of death is that it’s not a limitation, in a way. It could have happened any time and it is going to happen to someone any time. If you live your life according to that, death is irrelevant. Everything I’m doing right now is exactly what I want to do.

eight different cities before he was sixteen years old. Georgia O’Keeffe lived in the shadow of her “perfect” older brother Francis. And Jean-Michel Basquiat triumphed over poverty to become one of the world’s most influential artists. Kid Artists tells their stories and more with full-color cartoon illustrations on nearly every page. Other subjects include Claude Monet, Jacob Lawrence, Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Beatrix Potter, Yoko Ono, Dr. Seuss, Emily Carr, Keith Haring, Charles Schulz, and Louise Nevelson.

Suzy said my hair looks like there are dead animals living in it. At least they’re dead.

I am now 28 years old on the outside and nearly 12 years old on the inside. I always want to stay 12 years old on the inside.

I wish I was not so determined to feel secure about everything. I want everything to be comfortable and in reality nothing ever is.

am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible with as many different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached. The viewer creates the reality, the meaning, the conception of the piece. I am merely a middleman trying to bring ideas together.

The destructive element exists in all art, but ultimately is determined only by the ideas of the viewer.

BLACK LEATHER ITALIAN DOMINATION CALLING AFTER HE SAID BLACK EYES HIT HARD

Knowing that it is up to me what happens next. (And knowing when it is out of my hands.)

I had my baby shower at the Garage when I was pregnant with Paulo. Debbie Harry of Blondie and Andy Warhol threw it for me. That’s showing you normal. (Paulo and Keith Haring would also become very close; to Paulo, he was Uncle Keith. They would draw together, like it was the most fun you could have in the world.)

Every five years or so, my life catches me completely off guard and my inner voice starts screwing around. I have come to accept these phases, and, despite numerous initial doubts, I treat them seriously. Each phase centres on the suggestion of a major life change, regardless of whether I think I am happy at that precise time or not. These are not, initially, conscious decisions. My inner voice proposes that I’m unhappy and, to resolve this, suggests I make some alterations, presents some hare-brained idea from nowhere, lays the cards on the table and demands a decision. As ludicrous as the cards seem, and despite my protestations, they gradually start to nibble away at my sanity until my hesitation dwindles and, most of the time, I happily accept this new idea.

I paint differently every day. every hour. every minute. every instant.

Individuality is the enemy of this mass society. Individuality speaks for the individual and makes him a significant factor. Art is individuality.