Zack Hatsfield in Bookforum:
YOU KNOW KEITH HARING. He drew breakdancers and mushroom clouds and triclops and dicks and death and he drew Warhol’s envy. He painted on the Berlin Wall and on Bill T. Jones and on Grace Jones. He painted CRACK IS WACK and SILENCE = DEATH. He smuggled SAMO into SVA to tag the school’s graffiti-blitzed stairwell. His chalk ikons perfused Ed Koch’s decrepit metro, scrawled on seemingly every empty ad space. They called him Chalkman and the Degas of the B-boys, they called him genius and sellout. Club 57, Danceteria, Area, the Roxy, the Pyramid, the Palladium, the Mudd Club, Paradise Garage. Uniqlo, Coach, Nike.
“The first believable twentieth-century halo,” one critic called his Radiant Baby, that eureka light bulb of an infant. “It looks as if it’s always been there,” wrote Rene Ricard of the signature tag in “The Radiant Child,” his 1981 Artforum essay on East Village art now best known for boosting Jean-Michel Basquiat to greater prominence. “If Cy Twombly and Jean Dubuffet had a baby and gave it up for adoption, it would be Jean-Michel,” Ricard surmised. And if Dubuffet had a tryst with Warhol, their radiant child would be Keith, his “primitive” Pop flowing from a seemingly endless élan vital cut short by the artist’s death at thirty-one from aids, in 1990. Thirty-four years later, everybody knows his name. But do we still believe that halo?
More here.