Steve Jobs' Influence on the Arts

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Steve Jobs’ Influence on the Arts

Apple Logo by Andy Warhol

Much can be said about Steve Jobs’ influence on personal computers - and indeed society as we know it today. But as we remember the life of this great man, it is worth mentioning the early impact Apple had on art. Below are two interview quotes - one from Jobs’ perspective and one from Andy Warhol’s - as they remember meeting in 1984:

“The Interview was all but complete when I met Jobs at a celebrity-filled birthday party for a youngster in New York City [Sean Lennon]. As the evening progressed, I wandered around to discover that Jobs had gone off with the nine-year-old birthday boy to give him the gift he’d brought from California: a Macintosh computer. As I watched, he showed the boy how to sketch with the machine’s graphics program. Two other party guests wandered into the room and looked over Jobs’s shoulder. ‘Hmmm,’ said the first, Andy Warhol. ‘What is this? Look at this, Keith. This is incredible!’ The second guest, Keith Haring, the graffiti artist whose work now commands huge prices, went over. Warhol and Haring asked to take a turn at the Mac, and as I walked away, Warhol had just sat down to manipulate the mouse. ‘My God!’ he was saying, ‘I drew a circle!’”

- From Steve Jobs’ interview for Playboy Magazine, February 1985

“After dinner Yoko and Sean and some of the people went over to the WNEW broadcast that they were originally going to do inside the building, but at the last minute Dakota wouldn’t let them. But most of the people stayed behind. We went into Sean’s bedroom―and there was a kid there setting up an apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, “Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.” And he looked so young, like a college guy. And he told me that he would still send me one now. And then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in color. And then Keith [Haring] and Kenny [Scharf] used it. Keith had already used it once to make a t-shirt, but Kenny was using it for the first time, and I felt so old & out of it with this young whiz guy right there who’d helped invent it.”

~The Andy Warhol Diaries, pg. 607