Hrag Vartanian

My review of Keith Haring: 20th Anniversary at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery has been published in the Brooklyn Rail. The show closes today (Saturday, April, 3, 2010), so if you want to see it you better run.

Here’s a taste:

Containing dozens of works from every stage of his mature artistic life, Haring’s unintended retrospective (there isn’t even a catalogue) at Shafrazi is well thought-out and interesting but inadvertently highlights some of the artist’s shortcomings.

And:

His tendency to interact with his time and place is also what lends his work an archaeological air. The titles of many of his works record the date of their creation, sometimes to the day, tying the viewer’s experience of the work to a specific moment, like remembering where you were when Reagan was shot, or when the stock market crashed in 1987.