March 11, 2023 Issue

Jackson Arn, in his absorbing “The Boy Who Cried Art,” in this week’s issue, says of graffiti artist Keith Haring, “His chalk drawings are almost always very crude, so as not to interfere with the whooshing immediacy of the performance or the nervous allure of the performer.” That “whooshing immediacy” is brilliant. I wonder if it was inspired by Norman Mailer’s great “The Faith of Graffiti” (included in Mailer’s 1982 essay collection Pieces and Pontifications). Mailer wrote, 

Yes, the graffiti had not only the feel and all the super-powered whoosh and impact of all the bubble letters in all the mad comic strips, but the zoom, the aghr, and the ahhr of screeching rails, the fast motion of subways roaring into stations, the comic strips come to life.

Arn mentions Mailer’s essay in his piece. I think Mailer’s appreciation of graffiti was deeper than Arn’s is. Arn calls it “Business Art.” He calls Haring a “Business Artist.” What do those terms mean? Arn writes,

Even in its infancy, there was something in New York graffiti that smacked of Business Art. You can see it in Basquiat, who put a copyright symbol on his creations well before they hung in galleries. Or watch “Stations of the Elevated,” Manfred Kirchheimer’s ecstatic M.T.A. documentary. Pay attention to the way he cuts between spray-painted trains and signs for Burger King and Coppertone. When people watched the film in 1981, they may have sensed aesthetic deadlock: commercial art and street art face to face, without much of anything to say to each other. But you might also interpret these scenes as street art competing with commercial art, trying to match its bigness and brightness—and, the moment you do, Haring seems less the artist who betrayed graffiti and more the artist who made its guilty dreams come true.

"Guilty dreams"? I don’t see anything guilty about graffiti. I see it as our version of cave painting, an exuberant assertion that we exist in this time and place.