Debate: Is it art, or is it a shop? Keith Haring's iconic Pop Shop is reborn as both
As an artist, Keith Haring delighted in the idea that his work should be available to everybody – that it should appeal not only to rich collectors who wanted to admire canvases on walls but also to the average person in the street who simply wanted to buy a keyring, T-shirt or baseball-cap.
Haring loved to turn convention on its head. He first came to public attention with his chalk drawings on the New York subway in the late 1970s, and his later art retained this cartoonish quality, shaped by bold lines and vivid colours. But perhaps the most defining aspect of his work was his determination that it should have democratic appeal. Having started out on the street, in a milieu shaped by the explosion of the 80s dance music scene, he maintained an antipathetic relationship to the cloistered atmosphere of the white-walled art gallery. The Pop Shop, which opened at the height of Reaganomics in 1986 to sell branded T-shirts, toys and magnets, was part of this vision. It closed in 2005 owing to rising costs, but the shop has been reconstructed as part of Tate Modern's exhibition Pop Life: Art in a Material World.
For Haring, heavily influenced by his friend Andy Warhol's contention that "good business is the best art", the Pop Shop provided a space in which to turn his artistic idiom into a mass-produced merchandised logo. The philosophy was, according to Haring, "to continue this same sort of communication as with the subway drawings. I wanted to attract the same wide range of people, and I wanted it to be a place where, yes, not only collectors could come but also kids from the Bronx."
From outside, it looked unremarkable: a glass-fronted boutique in SoHo, capped by a rectangular awning. But inside, Haring covered the walls, ceiling and floor in a monochrome graffiti scrawl (the floor eventually became filthy and was replaced in 1995). The shelves were stocked with an array of inflatable babies, baseball caps and Swatch watches, all sold to customers against a backdrop of blaring rap. Its clientele was hip and eclectic: Madonna, the original Material Girl, was a regular customer in the 80s and believed her own commercial success was framed by Haring's vision. She has said: "Keith… managed to take something from what I call Street Art, which was an underground counterculture, and raise it to a pop culture for mass consumption. And I did that too."
In the Tate Modern exhibit, which is expected to draw huge crowds, the graffitied mural has been painstakingly recreated, and visitors will once again be able to buy the vibrant, mass-produced Haring merchandise that is currently only available online. "We worked closely with the Haring estate on making the most faithful translation of the original Pop Shop we could," explains Nicholas Cullinan, the assistant curator. "We wanted it to be a living, breathing entity, so we have Keith Haring's mix tapes playing and we recreated the mural, which was done spontaneously and very quickly, directly on to the wall because the original wasn't flawless; there were drips of paint, and we wanted to recapture that energy.
"On the shelves we have mixed in original objects from the Pop Shop with current versions sold online. It's a mix between the archival and the commercial."
Although Haring attracted criticism for diminishing the integrity of his art through crass commercialism, his legacy proved extremely influential. There had previously been one-off attempts by artists to engage with the commercial aspect of their art – Claes Oldenburg's Store, in which he sold plaster sculptures of everyday items, for instance, or Warhol's Factory – but Haring was the first artist to turn his marketplace so successfully into his medium. By engaging with mass media and cultivating his own marketable brand, he paved the way for Damien Hirst's unapologetic fusion of art and commerce, as well as Tracey Emin's and Sarah Lucas's shop in Bethnal Green, east London, where they sold their work in the mid-1990s.
"He was instrumental in terms of challenging the traditional art/commerce dynamic," says the contemporary art dealer Simon Oldfield. "Together with his contemporaries such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, he ushered in a new era and commented on contemporary culture in a way nobody else got close to. Pop Shop was an act of genius. It took Warhol's Factory to the street."
Haring did not live to see the lasting impact his ideas would have on a subsequent generations: he died of Aids in 1990 at the age of 31. In his last years he used his work to raise awareness of the disease, and his images promoting messages of safe sex did much to shatter the taboo that surrounded the illness.
His art lives on, not only in galleries such as Tate Modern but also where he most wanted it to thrive – on the street.
Pop Life opens at Tate Modern in London on Thursday. The Observer is media partner of the exhibition
Win tickets: reader event
For a chance to win a pair of tickets to an exclusive Observer reader event at Tate Modern on 8 October, including a private view of the exhibition and a talk by artist Gavin Turk, go to: guardian.co.uk/pop-life-competition. Competition closes at midnight tonight (27 September 2009).
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