Kurt Andersen ~ The New Yorker

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE - July 7, 1997

With Keith Haring Back at the Whitney, It Feels Like the Eighties Again

BY KURT ANDERSEN

MY FRIEND WHO RUNS a several-hundred-million-dollar hedge fund is obsessed with calling each market bottom, divining that precise moment when share values have fallen as far as they’re going to fall and can therefore only go up. When I began hearing that Hamptons homeowners were summering elsewhere at an unprecedented rate this year, I thought I sensed a market bottom—not in South Fork real-estate prices, about which I have no idea, but in the nineteen-eighties as Zeit-
geist artifact and life-style concept. If the Hamptons were all about the eighties, and vice versa, and if the Hamptons are now over (“over” in the sense of a brilliant supernova that collapses into a black hole—still supermassive and inescapable, but just not very . . . bright), then the eighties, I figure, must be about to rebound like crazy.

Of course, there have been some leading indicators of an incipient eighties revival: “Rent”; the permanently rising stock market; Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat movie; the solvency of Donald Trump; the comeback of Aerosmith; the appearance on fashion-show runways of stiletto heels and micro-miniskirts; a renewed cachet attaching to caviar and fur and cigars and narcotics. But until the Whitney Museum, an ur-eighties cultural institution, got into the act, one couldn’t be absolutely sure. Last week, a major retrospective devoted to the work of the graffiti artist Keith Haring opened at the Whitney, and now it’s indisputable: the eighties are back.

Keith Haring was like the Hamptons: manic, moneyed, fun, party-driven, celebrity-obsessed, shameless—that is, like the eighties. The decade didn’t really start until the end of 1982, when the great modern bull market began. That’s also when Haring’s career took off, thanks to his inclusion in that season’s Whitney Biennial. And befitting such a self-conscious era, there were no loose ends when the decade concluded: practically the instant 1989 turned to 1990, the Berlin Wall came down, a recession began, Trump went bust, and, on February 16th, Keith Haring died of AIDS.

“There was such a sense that he was delighted to be alive in that decade,” Elisabeth Sussman, curator of the Whitney show, said when I asked about Haring. “It’s so quintessentially eighties to go from the street to the disco to the gallery.” In art, salient features of the eighties were a return to figurative style, the disappearance of distinctions between high and low, and the rise of full-bore marketing and of the overpriced overnight sensation. Haring, of course, embodied all of these, but, unlike many of the decade’s “serious” young artists, he did not insist on appearing anguished as well as rich. He wasn’t a dark, handsome, unsmiling asshole. His barking dogs, glowing babies, and jaunty everypeople are not much more than pleasant downtown wallpaper, evanescent Bobby McFerrinism—don’t worry, sell doodles!—but at least their unpretentiousness and unimportance are in proper synch.

Keith Haring now seems more like a character in “Rent” than an actual person. The Whitney exhibit even has its own soundtrack CD, produced by the Haring-era d.j. Junior Vasquez. The artist’s natural sweetness has been distilled, inevitably, into a slightly cloying version of itself—Haring as boho Barney. Children will be admitted free to the museum (where they will doubtless enjoy the lesser-known Haring images of cheery erect penises and fellatio). The evocations of Haring’s inner-child joie de vivre and the fact of his death at age thirty-one bathe him in a heroic glow. At the Whitney, one can begin to imagine a time, not so far off, when one aspect of our common eighties memory archives will be a bittersweet survivors’ recollection of the plague era, like grandparents’ accounts of the 1918 influenza epidemic—that is, H.I.V. nostalgia.

Here’s how modern retro works: each completed decade needs to lie fallow for seven or eight years before nostalgia can sprout, bloom like crazy for another seven or eight years, and then disappear. Remember-the-seventies delirium broke out among the fashion forward in 1988; by 1995, the “Brady Bunch” movie was a hit and seventies clothing modes (bell-bottoms, tight synthetics, ruffled satiny shirts) were moving fast from cutting-edge designer collections to the Gap.

Which means the seventies revival will be thoroughly tapped out just as the eighties revival kicks in. Any day now Vogue will be declaring, “The power suit is back!” A Michael Ovitz figure will arise, possibly Michael Ovitz himself. Wall Street will crash, but we won’t panic. And let’s see, there will be an interminable Presidential scandal like Iran-Contra that nobody besides the President’s political enemies and the special prosecutor really cares about. David Letterman will be the coolest thing on late night, a McNally brother will open another ultra-fabulous downtown restaurant, and the Whitney Museum will hang paintings by Keith Haring and make Hilton Kramer apoplectic. So maybe this isn’t an eighties “revival.” Maybe the early nineties were just a hiatus. Maybe the eighties never ended.©