"In perfect sync with his much-hyped generation, Keith... adored the Monkees more than the Beatles and was briefly a Jesus freak...."

"Haring may have out-Warholed Warhol, a mentor and collaborator, in enjoying celebrity friends.... But he was less cool than hot, eager and earnest: handing out free buttons and selling cheap merch at his prescient Pop Shop but fretting about his place in the canon and firing off indignant letters to editors. Time magazine’s influential critic Robert Hughes emerges here as a particular Joker to his Batman, likening Haring and his friend Jean-Michel Basquiat to 'those two what’s their names on "Miami Vice"' and calling them 'Keith Boring' and 'Jean-Michel Basketcase.' (Good lord!)..."

From "A New Keith Haring Biography Draws the Most Complete Picture Yet/In his thoroughly researched 'Radiant,' Brad Gooch considers the short, blazing life of the ’80s artist, activist and man about downtown" (NYT).

ADDED: The New Yorker article is "Keith Haring, the Boy Who Cried Art/Was he a brilliant painter or a brilliant brand?" Excerpt:

Nabokov has a short, vivid scene about a bouquet of flowers. The bouquet sits in a shop that makes copies of old curios. A boy strolls in and touches the petals, expecting them to be lifeless, only to find that they’re the real deal, camouflaged by a roomful of fakery. Brad Gooch’s new biography, “Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring” (Harper), often gives you the sense that Haring was, in essence, that bouquet: an utterly genuine person in a profession full of artifice. Even as a child, in small-town Pennsylvania, he had a gift for embracing mass culture with total, solemn fervor, whether it was supposed to be solemn or not. In the fourth grade, he fell hard for the Monkees and filled a notebook with cutout pictures of Davy Jones; in junior high, inspired by Billy Graham and maybe “Godspell,” Haring found Jesus and rated all hundred and fifty of the Psalms on a scale from “good” to “ugh!”