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I just finished watching The Universe of Keith Haring, one of the best documentary’s I’ve ever seen. It was directed by Christina Clause and came out in 2008. The subject, needless to say, was one of my favorite artists: Keith Haring, who I discovered in High School after buying a pair of Jeremy Scott track pants that featured a signature Keith Haring print.

There was a scene in the film that really spiked my interest. It consisted of Keith Haring riding a bicycle through an exhibition of his work and commenting on the pace at which we go by art. He stated that he thought art was perfect for cruising by. If we think about street art and other work that catches us off guard, this is true. But in a gallery, we are trained to slow down and take an extraordinary amount of time to look at and observe work. We are taught that this is respectful to the artists, who’s work is deep and meaningful. We are taught that work can be deconstructed in many ways, and so therefore we must sit and analyse work rather than simply appreciating it or letting it have an emotional effect. Neither subconscious or intellectual responses are correct; both are inevitable and important but one is clearly favoured.

I find it snobbish that the amount of time we spend at a gallery somehow reflects how intellectual, understanding and respectful we are. I think the snobbery exists as a defense mechanism to criticism or to the fact that a lot of people find a lot of art boring, myself included.

As an aside, I’d like to reference Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, which at one point features the main characters racing through the Louvre. I think it says a lot. Whether it’s an extension of the French New Wave philosophy and is a rejection of a selected cultural history of whether it’s simply a playful, funny gesture, I don’t particularly mind, but it’s one of the few scenes in that film that I remember and I think it’s for good reason.

I was intrigued to read last night that Andy Warhol made a 25 hour film titled **** (Four Stars). I did a bit of looking around before finding this page, which gives a nice overview of the history of the film. More creepy than interesting, however, is what else I found out about Warhol on this page:

Andy Warhol’s description of the full version, quoted above, is a rare example of the artist expressing his own personal emotional state. In the quote, he seems almost melancholic about the passage of time. He describes the screening as though he is describing a death - “our lives, flashing in front of us.” In general, Warhol avoided the subject of death - except in his paintings (the Disaster series). He did not attend the funerals of his superstars nor did he attend his mother’s funeral when she died in November 1972. After she passed away he continued to give the impression that she was still alive to people who would ask about her.

David Bourdon:

Andy did not mention his mother’s death to any of his close friends. Fred Hughes accidentally found out she had died when he happened to answer a phone call from Andy’s brother, John. Jed Johnson did not learn of her death until the summer of 1975, when he saw James Warhola, Paul’s son, and asked, ‘How’s your grandmother doing?’ As late as 1976, when friends asked about his mother, Andy said, ‘Oh, she’s great. But she doesn’t get out of bed much.” (DB322)

What I read above really confirms something that I read in a book about Warhol by Klaus Honnef:

It is difficult to find out the truth about the life of Andy Warhol (The name he took after he moved to New York in 1949). Contradictions seem to have been his life’s elixir, the veiling of biographical and other personal facts the means he used to create a mystery around himself…Yet, no other artist of his time has left us with as many maxims as he did. As well as an abundnace of interviews and aphorisms he left us two autobiographies, although nobody can say for sure who actually wrote these books, Warhol himself or one of his numerous ghost writers.