KEITH HARING, ANDY WARHOL AND WALT DISNEY...

KEITH HARING, ANDY WARHOL AND WALT DISNEY edited by Bruce D. Kurtz (te Neues/ Prestel: $45); KEITH HARING: Future Primeval by Barry Blinderman (Abbeville: $19.95); KEITH HARING: The Authorized Biography by John Gruen (Firestone: $15). Two years after the artist’s death from AIDS, books about Keith Haring have become a sort of cottage industry. John Gruen’s biography features lots of quotes from Haring and his friends, but it’s basically a puff piece that assures readers what a neat guy he was. “Future Primeval,” a catalogue from an exhibit at Illinois State University, offers essays that are highly laudatory but not particularly enlightening. In the epigraph, Haring, the master of merchandising, says (without a trace of irony) that art “celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.” The most interesting of these tomes is the catalogue from an exhibit at the Phoenix Art Museum devoted to Disney, Warhol and Haring, which might be subtitled “two hits and a miss.” Juxtaposing Haring’s output with the work of two far more talented individuals showcases the limits of his ability. Although Disney and Warhol were sometimes guilty of lapses in taste and blatant commercialization, they also made important contributions to the iconography of Western art and culture. In an essay that’s often fuzzy on details, Kurtz states, “Haring went beyond the art historical precedents to be more blatantly cartoon-like and childlike than any fine artist before him.” But the illustrations prove that Warhol and the Disney animators, from Ub Iwerks to Andreas Deja, could make a real statement with a few lines on a piece of paper. Haring’s work looks cartoon-like because he couldn’t draw any better; his slack outlines lack the expressive vitality that characterizes the work of a good cartoonist. All three books celebrate an artist whose success looks increasingly like a triumph of packaging, hype and chutzpah.