For José I. B. G.,
whose self-painted phone case would delight Keith Haring
(but not the Foundation that bears his name).

In recent years, the proliferation of products fused with Keith Haring’s art, endorsed by the Keith Haring Foundation itself, has skyrocketed. Among these, we can find the (already distant in time) collaborations with brands such as Moleskine and Polaroid, among some other more recent and recurrent ones with CASETiFY, Calzedonia, Primark, Uniqlo, Billabong, H&M, as well as with various brands of the Inditex group (more specifically, Pull&Bear, Bershka, and Stradivarius). There were also specific collections launched, such as those of Pandora and Dr. Martens, to which we should add the recent collaboration with Crocs (shoes and Jibbitz charms).

However, there have been other less predictable partnerships, such as the Miracle Gel nail polish, Etta Loves baby bath toys, and La Fermière yogurts. Regarding the latter, a Twitter/X online user, writing from the American supermarket chain Whole Foods, commented in an ironic tone, “this is exactly what Keith would have wanted”.

The disparity and amount of products and companies with which these collaborations have been carried out, without having any clear editorial policy representing the initial values of the Keith Haring Foundation, is astonishing.  Even more so if we take into account how, during his lifetime, Haring himself had a considerably balanced relationship with the commercial world. He occasionally collaborated with some top brands (such as Fiorucci, Swatch or Absolut), but also turned down offers from others that did not match his principles (such as the instant food company Kraft).

On the other hand, the desired control over the products branded with his art became evident in 1986, with the opening of the company’s own store in Manhattan, the Pop Shop, that remained open until 2005. This Pop Shop, which set up a branch in Tokyo from 1987 to 1988, was conceived as an extension of his work, which sought to bring his art close to the public through everyday items, such as T-shirts, toys or badges, at affordable prices. Ahead of accusations of commercialism of the store, Haring responded openly in an interview in Rolling Stone in August 1989:

My work was starting to become more expensive and more popular within the art market. Those prices meant that only people who could afford big art prices could have access to the work. The Pop Shop makes it accessible. To me, the Pop Shop is totally in keeping ideologically with what Andy [Warhol] was doing and what conceptual artists and earth artists were doing: It was all about participation on a big level. If it was about money, I could have been the most successful commercial designer and illustrator in the world. I’ve turned down numerous huge things.

Furthermore, beyond being mere displays of pop art, the store’s products showed Haring’s socio-political concerns, through ACT-UP slogans or, for example, messages and drawings against apartheid in South Africa. The Pop Shop also featured products with works of other contemporary artists, friends of Haring, such as Kenny Scharf and Jean Michel Basquiat.

Therefore, the suspicion aroused by these recent commercial collaborations is justifiably reasoned and, in fact,  has been noted for several years already. In October 2022, the LGBTIQ+ news portal PinkNews commented, among others, on the appearance of the Pandora collection, released for sale on September 29 of that year. The article reflects users comments about the lack of transparency regarding the campaign’s fundraising, the total omission of Haring’s sexual orientation, the lack of information about how Haring and the newly established Foundation supported financially HIV/AIDS research and education (the real reason, as will be seen below, for which the Foundation was created), and his death from disease-related complications on February 16, in 1990.

A month later, Lauren Cochranen, mentioning the PinkNews publication, addressed in an article from The Guardian whether the exacerbated number of collections was compromising Haring’s legacy through the reduction of his art to glorified logos. Cochranen managed to speak with Gil Vazquez, the current president of the Keith Haring Foundation, who defended his elections of fast fashion brands as a solution to maintain affordable prices on products. However, the negative impacts of fast fashion are numerous and go directly against the Foundation’s original principles. The increasingly evident link between neo-colonialism and the exploitation of human and environmental resources, and particularly the child exploitation, promoted by this industry, contradict the Foundation’s support for underprivileged children and for people at risk of exclusion.

Keith Haring created the Keith Haring Foundation in 1989, a year after he was diagnosed HIV-positive, to raise funds for HIV/AIDS research and advocacy. He also invested in resources and education for children at risk of exclusion, as well as in various charities related to these causes. At his death, the Foundation was already a multimillion-dollar entity, responsible for guarding his legacy and promoting it. However, as is usual, unfortunately, the foundations themselves are complicit in the suppression of the identity of these artists who left too soon and whose death was, and remains, a political issue. They are therefore complicit in the blurring of the same legacy they supposedly safeguard.

Without the political and social context in which these works were created, they mean nothing, they become mere decorative artifacts that contribute to the stabilization of gentrification, and especially the gentrified thinking, of which Sarah Schulman (2012) speaks, which began to appear at the exact moment when “the radical direct action expression of gay liberation began to be overwhelmed by assimilation ―one of the principal consequences of AIDS”. (Schulman, 2012)

The communal dimension has always been one of the characteristic factors of Keith Haring’s work, both in form and content. Regarding the former, his creation of new forms of production stands out, alien to the corporate and business culture that in our neoliberal society end up phagocytizing everything, including dissident identities (Nair, 2014). Through formal innovation, and breaking the (not only phonetic) association of the museum-mausoleum  (Adorno apud Crimp, 1993), Keith Haring managed to defend and celebrate through his art and his products everything he believed in: fun, equality, homosexual sex, the accessibility of art, the right to childhood, etc. The current activity of the Keith Haring Foundation transforms this art, in its multiple commercial versions, into a sign of cultural capital for its buyers, regardless of their identities (queer or not) and/or their values.

Given the statements of its current director in The Guardian article, and the proliferation of products in the last two years, we cannot expect a total halt in production by the Keith Haring Foundation. Perhaps, we can only fantasize about a change in the production line in which other types of products or, even, other types of drawings by Haring would have a place. For example, his more sexually explicit drawings, which have already been claimed in social networks to appear in some kind of merchandising. Of course, if there is a new Pandora collection, these drawings would inspire some incredible charms, which Rosalia could perfectly combine with her Dick Bag by Stef Van Looveren.

However, what we actually can hope for, and indeed make, are our own versions of products, in pirated edition, as Keith would have wanted. Because, as Élisabeth Lebovici (2019) reminds us;

Keith Haring inoculated a political program (HIV, homosexuality, poverty, racism, youth culture, drug abuse) into the circulation of the graphic language of this capitalist world. It infiltrates into that world he denounces as white and heterosexual. Hence, his queer desire to produce a system of recognizable signs, addressed to everyone, capable of seducing everyone, to also find a way to repeat and disseminate it, i.e. to clone it, using a term borrowed from the vocabulary of gay cultures. ^[1]«The ‘clone’ designates the stereotypical gay from the 1970s onward». Lebovici 2019: 69, n23.

Referencies

Crimp, Douglas. (1993). De vuelta al museo sin paredes. En J. V. Aliaga y J. M. G. Cortés (Eds.). De amor y rabia. Acerca del arte y el sida. Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (pp. 281-295).

Haring, Keith. (10 de agosto de 1989). Keith Haring: Just Say Know. Entrevista por David Sheff. Rolling Stone. Disponible en: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/keith-haring-just-say-know-71847/

Lebovici, Élisabeth. (2019). Sida. Arcadia/MACBA.

Nair, Yasmin. (2014). Against Equality, Against Marriage. An Introduction. En R. Conrad (Ed.). Against Equality. Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion. AK Press (pp. 15-21). 

Schulman, Sarah. (2012). The Gentrification of the Mind. Witness to a Lost Imagination. University of California Press.

[Featured Image: Keith Haring, «Tuttomundo», Pisa, back of the Convent of the Friars Servants of Mary, church of Sant’Antonio Abate, 1989. Wall mural, 180 m². ©Photo property of Marta Martín Díaz, 14 February 2023]