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Basquiat:
A Quick Killing in Art
by Pheobe Hoban
Chapter
One :: OVERDOSING ON ART
"If
you had only twenty-four hours left to live, what
would you do?" "I don't know. I'd go hang
out with my mother and my girlfriend, I guess."
--video interview, Tamra Davis and Becky Johnston,
1986
Friday, August 12,
1988
. On the sidewalk outside
57 Great Jones Street
, the usual sad lineup of crack addicts slept in
the burning sun. Inside the two-story brick
building, Jean-Michel Basquiat was asleep in his
huge bed, bathed in blue television light. The air
conditioner was broken and the room felt like a
microwave oven. The bathroom door was ajar,
revealing a glimpse of a black and tan Jacuzzi tub.
On the ledge of the tub was a small pile of bloody
syringes. There was a jagged hole punched in the
bathroom window. Beneath it was scrawled the legend
"Broken Heart," with Basquiat's favorite
punctuation, a copyright sign.
Kelle
Inman, Basquiat's twenty-two-year-old girlfriend,
was downstairs writing in the journal that Basquiat
had given her. He usually slept all day, but when he
still hadn't come down for breakfast by midafternoon,
Inman got worried. When she looked into the bedroom
to check up on him, the heat hit her full in the
face, like a wave. But Basquiat seemed to be
sleeping peacefully, so she went back downstairs.
She and the housekeeper heard what sounded like loud
snores, but thought nothing of it.
A
few hours later, Basquiat's friend Kevin Bray
called. He and Basquiat and another friend, Victor
Littlejohn, were supposed to go to a Run-D.M.C.
concert that evening, and he wanted to make plans
with Jean-Michel. Kelle climbed back up the stair's
to give Basquiat the message. This time, she found
him stretched on the floor, his head Jean-Michael on
his arm like a child's, a small pool of vomit
forming near his chin.
Inman
panicked. She had never seen anyone die, although
Basquiat's drug binges had made the scenario a
constant fear. Now it seemed like the worst had
happened. She ran to the phone and called Bray,
Littlejohn, and Vrej Baghoomian, Basquiat's last art
dealer.
"When
I got there," recalls Bray, "Kelle said
she had called an ambulance. She took me upstairs.
Jean-Michel looked like he was comfortably out cold.
He was on the floor, lying against the wall, as if
he had fallen down and didn't have the strength to
get up, and was just taking a nap. There was a lot
of clear liquid coming out of his mouth. We picked
him up and turned him over. We shook him, and we
just kept trying to revive him. It took a long time
for the ambulance to arrive. But for a while, after
the guys from the Emergency Medical Service came, we
thought he was going to be okay. They were giving
him shocks and IV treatment. Victor had to hold
Jean-Michel up like this so the IV's would
drain," says Bray, stretching his arms out in a
cruciform.
Bray
couldn't take it anymore. He went downstairs, where
Inman, and two assistants from the Baghoomian
gallery, Vera Calloway and Helen Traversi, were
trying to stay calm. "We tried to take his
pulse. His skin was so hot," says Calloway.
Baghoomian called the studio just as the paramedics
arrived. He was in
San
Francisco
and Helen was forced to act in his stead.
"It
was almost like it was some sort of business
transaction," says Bray. "They put a tube
in his throat and they brought him downstairs. They
wouldn't tell us whether he was dead or alive and
they took him outside. He had this beautiful
bubbling red-white foam coming out of his
mouth."
"We
all hoped some miracle would happen," recalls
Helen, who begins to cry at the memory. Outside on
the pavement, a small crowd had gathered in horror
and fascination. "I was about to leave on
vacation with my wife," says filmmaker Amos
Poe, who was a friend of the artist. "We
watched as they loaded his body into the ambulance.
I saw his father pull up in a Saab. I kept saying to
my wife. `Jean-Michel is dead.' He really lived out
that whole destructo legend: Die young, leave a
beautiful corpse."
At
Cabrini
Medical
Center
, Basquiat was pronounced dead on arrival. The
cause, according to the medical examiner's death
certificate, would be determined "pending
chemical examination." A later autopsy report
stated that Basquiat had died from "acute mixed
drug intoxication (opiates-cocaine)." In the
months before his death, Basquiat claimed he was
doing up to a hundred bags of heroin a day.
Basquiat
was buried at
Green-Wood
Cemetery
in
Brooklyn
five days later. His father invited only a few of
the artist's friends to the closed-casket funeral at
Frank Campbell's; they were outnumbered by the
phalanx of art dealers. The heat wave had broken,
and it rained on the group gathered at the cemetery
to bid Jean-Michel goodbye. The eulogy was delivered
by Citibank art consultant Jeffrey Deitch, lending
the moment an unintentionally ironic tone.
Blanca
Martinez, Basquiat's housekeeper, was struck by the
alienated attitude of the mourners. "They were
all standing separately, as if it were an
obligation," she says. "They didn't seem
to care. Some looked ashamed." People began to
leave the cemetery before the body was buried.
Ignoring the objections of the gravediggers,
Martinez
tearfully threw a handful of dirt onto the coffin
as they lowered it into the grave.
Basquiat's
mother, Matilde, looking dazed, approached
Baghoomian to thank him for his help to her son
during his last days. Gerard Basquiat later
admonished his former wife not to talk to the art
dealer. The scene was already being set for a bitter
battle over the estate of the artist.
The
following week, appraisers from Christie's set to
work taking inventory of the contents of the Great
Jones Street loft: finished and unfinished
paintings, other artists' works (including several
dozen Warhols and a piece by William Burroughs), a
vintage collection of Mission furniture, a closet
full of Armani and Comme des Garcons suits, a
library of over a thousand videotapes, hundreds of
audiocassettes, art books, a carton of the Charlie
Parker biography Bird
Lives!, several bicycles, a number of antique
toys, an Everlast punching bag, six music
synthesizers, some African instruments, an Erector
set, and a pair of handcuffs.
There
were also a number of paintings in warehouses:
following Andy Warhol's advice, Basquiat had tried
to squirrel some of his work away from his
ever-eager art dealers. According to Christie's,
Basquiat had left 917 drawings, 25 sketchbooks, 85
prints, and 171 paintings.
Artist
Dan Asher walked by his old friend's loft and was
astonished to see a number of Basquiat's favorite
things in a Dumpster: his shoes, his jazz
collection, a peculiar lamp made out of driftwood,
Sam Peckinpah's director's chair. Asher salvaged a
few items; he sold the chair to a collector.
It
would be another year before Gerard Basquiat ordered
a tombstone for his son. But for several weeks after
the artist's death, he was commemorated by a small
shrine some anonymous fan had placed by his door.
Shrouded in lace, it held flowers, votive candles, a
picture of Basquiat, some carefully copied prayers,
and a Xerox of a David Levine caricature of the
artist, complete with a caption: "In an age of
limitless options and limiting fears, he still makes
poems and paintings to evoke his world."
A
formal memorial service was finally held at Saint
Peter's Church in
Citicorp
Center
, on a stormy Saturday in November. Despite the
rain, wind, and bleak gray sky, several hundred
people crowded into the church. Behind the pulpit
hung a portrait of the artist as a young man,
superimposed on one of his faux-primitive paintings.
One by one, his former friends and lovers remembered
Basquiat.
Gray,
the band with which Jean-Michel had played at the
Mudd Club, performed several songs. John Lurie
played a saxophone solo. Ingrid Sischy, editor of Interview
magazine, read a eulogy. Ex-girlfriends Jennifer
Goode and Suzanne Mallouk tearfully read poems. And
Keith Haring, AIDS-thin, reminisced about his
friend. "He disrupted the politics of the art
world and insisted that if he had to play their
games, he would make the rules. His images entered
the dreams and museums of the exploiters, and the
world can never be the same."
Fab
5 Freddy, who knew Basquiat from his old graffiti
days, "interpolated" a poem by Langston
Hughes. "This is a song for the genius child.
Sing it softly, for the song is wild. Sing it softly
as ever you can--lest the song get out of hand.
Nobody loves a genius child. Can you love an eagle,
tame or wild? Wild or tame, can you love a monster,
of frightening name? Nobody loves a genius child.
Free [sic] him and let his soul run wild."
After
the service, everyone went to M.K., the
bank-turned-nightclub on lower
Fifth Avenue
. Owned by Jennifer Goode's brother, it was one of
Jean-Michel's favorite places. In fact, it was his
last destination the night before he died. He had
come to the club looking for Jennifer. Now people
stood around the big television set, sipping
champagne and watching a flickering black-and-white
video of Basquiat. A photographer from Fame magazine snapped pictures of the known and not-so-known: the
jewelry designer Tina Chow, and her sister, Adele
Lutz, David Byrne's wife. Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. It
was the perfect send-off for the eighties art star;
part opening, part wake.
CHAPTER
TWO :: THE NOT-SO-BRAVE NEW ART WORLD
Basquiat's
life spanned an historic shift in the art world,
from Pop to Neo-Expressionism, from hip to hype. It
was personified by Andy Warhol, the man who was to
celebrity what Freud was to the unconscious. When
Basquiat was born in December 1960, the Pop decade
had just begun. In December 1961, Claes Oldenburg
was showing household items in "The Store"
down on East Second Street; the following summer
Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup cans poured into
America's consciousness when they were put on
display in the window of Bonwit Teller and in the
Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles.
Comic
books, television, advertising itself; they all
became fodder for the new movement. Mass media was
both the new art's subject and its method of
dissemination. Even
America
's landscape--with its Technicolor billboards--was
innately Pop. "Pop art took the inside and put
it outside, took the outside and put it
inside," Warhol wrote in his bible of the era,
POPism.
At
Leo Castelli's gallery, a bastion of Abstract
Expressionism, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy
Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, and Jasper Johns were
showing paintings of modern detritus; bathroom
fixtures, Ben Day-dotted bimbos talking in air
balloons, American flags, Coke bottles. The
Museum
of
Modern Art
's symposium on Pop art, held in December 1962,
included an early champion;
Metropolitan
Museum
curator Henry Geldzahler, a Warhol intimate who
would become Mayor Ed Koch's cultural commissioner
of
New York
. Geldzahler would also be instrumental in helping
launch Jean-Michel Basquiat's career.
The
sixties also brought a whole new breed of collectors
into the forefront. Cab-fleet owner Robert Scull and
his wife, Ethel, became avid collectors of the new
art. One of Scull's passions was to discover the
work on his own, buying right out of the artist's
studio. The Sculls also liked to socialize with the,
artists they collected, throwing huge parties at
their home on
Long Island
. This would also be a favorite activity of the
nouveau riche collectors of the eighties, who seemed
to crave the kind of high produced by being in close
proximity to the Artist.
Pop
art planted the seeds of the Neo-Expressionist art
of the eighties--spawning its aesthetics and hype.
Pop is "doing the easiest thing," Warhol
had written. "Anybody could do anything."
But art was also "just another job," one
that could be turned, he soon demonstrated, into a
moneymaking machine. Warhol took an American
classic, the assembly-line, and applied it to art.
He made no bones about it; he called his studio the
Factory. Thousands of kids pouring out of art school
with Bachelor of Fine Art degrees in the 1970s
followed his lead.
They
flooded into
New
York
from all over the country in the middle to late
1970s, a new generation of would-be rock stars,
artists, dancers, and actors. It was still possible
to find cheap apartments in
Alphabet
City
and lower
Manhattan
. There were few homeless. AIDS didn't exist. The
city was an urban frontier, theirs for the taking.
Before long, influenced by the Punk movement in
England
, wildly coiffed young people with multicolored
Mohawks and safety-pinned clothes seemed to have
taken over the
East
Village
--then still a scary neighborhood full of shooting
galleries. CBGB's on the Bowery became a mecca for
the new bands: the Ramones, Television, the Talking
Heads. Punk-rock boutiques began popping up around
St. Mark's Place.
A
new
Bohemia
was in the making, a wild nexus of music, fashion,
and art that created a distinctive downtown
aesthetic. Punk and the subsequent New Wave
movements that quickly took over were a welcome
antidote to the sterile Conceptual and Minimalist
art that had numbed the art scene during the
post-Pop decade, boring both critics and collectors.
Even slam-dancing was preferable to the mindless
throb of Saturday
Night Fever music pulsing in the discos.
Like
the sixties, this was a multimedia event, amplified
by an English invasion of fashion and music that
crisscrossed the
Atlantic
and was transmuted in
Manhattan
. It had its drugs of choice; instead of getting
stoned on marijuana, speeding on amphetamines, or
tripping on LSD, people snorted coke the way the
stars in Godard films sucked on cigarettes, or got
into cool, strung out heroin. The Sex Pistols
replaced the Beatles; cute Paul McCartney became
decadent Johnny Rotten, dressed in torn, black rags
instead of psychedelic tie-dye. Johnny Rotten gave
way to the robotic Devo and Klaus Nomi and the
jubilant B-52's.
But
there was another, more profound difference. Unlike
the sixties, the new cultural movement had no real
ideology, no revolution at its core. It was as if
the veiled commercialism of such historic sold-out
events as the rock musical Hair
or
Woodstock
had been stripped of any pretext of politics. No
one raised an eyebrow when ex-radical and
Chicago
7 kingpin Jerry Rubin became a stockbroker and
began to throw networking parties at the
Underground.
There
was also no generation gap: from the start, adults
began to exploit the obvious possibilities. The late
seventies paved the way for the eighties, which
celebrated the materialism the sixties had rebelled
against. New Wave everything from fashion to
graphics was soon inundating Madison Avenue.
Fiorucci, on
Fifty-seventh
Street
,
became the first uptown boutique to combine the new
fashion, music, and art. And anything and everything
was considered art.
Perhaps
the most blatant exploitation by uptown of the
downtown art scene was the marketing of the graffiti
movement, which galvanized the art world in the late
seventies and was completely passe by 1983. For a
brief moment the inner-city artists, whose work had
been followed for years by transit cops, not
critics, were the darlings of
Fifty-seventh
Street
and
SoHo
. But the "limousine liberals"--upscale
dealers and pseudo radical collectors--soon got
bored with baby-sitting and found some new neo
movement to market.
Real
estate played a major role in the new
Bohemia
and its shifting boundaries; as one area became
gentrified, artists migrated to the next new place.
At this point,
SoHo
, the industrial area south of
Houston Street
, was still full of textile outlets, floor-sanding
companies, and riveters--and lofts that artists
could live in under the Artist in Residence (A.I.R.)
rental regulations. There were few, if any,
residential amenities--Dean and DeLuca was just a
tiny little gourmet store. And despite the growing
artist population, by
Fifty-seventh Street
gallery standards, the neighborhood was still
practically the Wild West. But by 1979, when Julian
Schnabel, one of the first Neo-Expressionist art
stars, had his first show at the Mary Boone Gallery
on West Broadway, the cross-pollination between the
East
Village
and
SoHo
was in full bloom. Within the next few years,
SoHo
would evolve into the Madison Avenue of the
downtown scene.
By
the end the seventies, a whole group of downtown
clubs had sprung up--from the Mudd Club on
White
Street
in TriBeCa to Club 57 on St. Mark's Place, to
Danceteria on
Twenty-third Street
, raunchy parodies of the fabulous Studio 54 where
Warhol and his celebrity cronies--Bianca and Halston
and Calvin and Brooke--were hanging out, with one
big difference. People didn't just dance and do
drugs and hob-nob in these clubs: they were venues
for performance art, underground films, New Wave
music. The Talking Heads--art students turned
musicians--were paradigmatic of the scene. Artists
were mixing up their media; music, film, painting,
and fashion were recombining in innovative ways.
From fashion to music, television was a central
reference point for this burgeoning baby-boomer
culture.
By
early 1979, Jean-Michel Basquiat had established
himself as an artistic persona: SAMO, the author of
cryptic sayings scrawled on public spaces all over
Manhattan
--including, strategically, near
SoHo
's newest galleries. It was the beginning of his
art career, and it segued neatly with the
"discovery" of graffiti. At the time, it
was convenient, but Basquiat had no intention of
being lumped into a category with a bunch of kids
who bombed trains. In fact, Basquiat was not a true
graffiti artist; he didn't work up through ranks as
a "toy," earning the right to leave his
tag on certain turf, and he never drew on subways;
certainly the stars of Wild
Style, Charlie Ahearn's graffiti film of the
time, didn't consider Basquiat a real member of
their group. Ultimately, Basquiat would be the only
black artist to survive the graffiti label, and find
a permanent place as a black painter in a white art
world.
Basquiat's
nascent career coincided with the advent of a major
art-world revival, from the tiny storefront
galleries of the
East
Village
to
SoHo
's expansionist West Broadway to the suddenly
crowded auction houses. For the first time in a over
a decade, a new art movement, Neo-Expressionism, had
seduced both critics and collectors. Painting was
back; from Julian Schnabel to Susan Rothenberg,
artists were reveling in the return of figurativism.
But
what radically changed the art world by the time
Basquiat entered the scene was money. In the early
1980s, Wall Street's bull market engendered an
interesting offspring:
SoHo
's bull market. The new money of the eighties was
increasingly invested into art. By 1983, the art
market in
New York
alone, was estimated at $2 billion. Gallery
dealers became power players, barely distinguishable
in lingo and lifestyle from their Wall Street
clientele. Banks began accepting art as collateral
for loans. Corporations began stockpiling important
contemporary-art collections. Every weekend,
SoHo
was clogged with a parade of art lovers slumming
at openings. At auction houses, packed rooms
applauded as records were set for everything from
van Gogh's "Irises"--$53.9 million--to $17
million for "False Start" by Jasper Johns.
Chauffeured
cars disgorged fur-coated women into tiny storefront
galleries in the bowels of the
East
Village
. Eugene and Barbara Schwartz epitomized the new
collectors. A wealthy publisher of how-to books,
Schwartz and his wife spent most of the mid-eighties
shopping for art every Saturday, hitting the hottest
galleries in the
East
Village
and
SoHo
. Collectors like Charles Saatchi, head of the
multinational advertising conglomerate Saatchi &
Saatchi, acquired a dreadful power: the ability to
make and break an artist overnight, as the
advertising baron did with the work of Italian
painter Sandro Chia, first buying up and then
dumping his paintings en masse.
The
art boom created a crop of suddenly famous young
careerist-artists; Julian Schnabel, David Salle,
Francesco Clemente, Eric Fischl, Keith Haring,
Robert Longo, Mark Kostabi, and Kenny Scharf. The
Whitney's Biennial became a launching pad for the
latest stars. Collectors like Don and Mera Rubell
soon developed a ritual: hundreds crowded into their
art-filled
Upper East Side
town house for their Biennial opening-night party.
In
the eighties, the bifurcated role of art as a
vehicle for stardom and art as raw commodity reached
its zenith. For the contemporary artist, success
meant instant recognition; magazine covers and Gap
ads, not just museum shows. And the new art
collectors, unlike those who invested in junk bonds,
could at least pretend they had put their money into
something of value.
Warhol,
a wigged-out psychic, had presaged the whole thing.
In POPism, he spelled it out tot the next generation: "To be
successful as an artist, you have to have your work
shown by a good gallery for the same reason, say,
that Dior never sold his originals from a counter in
Woolworth's. It's a matter of marketing, among other
things. If a guy has, say, a few thousand dollars to
spend on a painting . . . He wants to buy something
that's going to go up and up in value, and the only
way that can happen is with a good gallery, one that
looks out for the artist, promotes him, and sees to
it that his work is shown in the right way to the
right people. Because if the artist were to fade
away, so would this guy's investment ... No matter
how good you are, if you are not promoted right, you
won't be one of those remembered names."
Fame
and Greed: the Twin Peaks of the eighties art world.
The career of Jean-Michel Basquiat cashed in on
both. Not surprisingly, he managed to become
Warhol's protege along the way. As an added bonus, a
kind of historical footnote to the cynical decade,
Jean-Michel Basquiat was black--the first
contemporary African-American artist to become an
international star.
Basquiat's
black identity is manifest throughout his art. Not
overtly political, his sense of what it means to be
a black man in contemporary America couldn't be more
clearly conveyed, whether it's in the grinning heads
in "Hollywood Africans," or the poignant
tribute to his idol Charlie Parker, "Charles
the First" or the ironic "Undiscovered
Genius of the Mississippi Delta."
Many
of his stylistic trademarks are themselves a
recognizable part of the continuum of
well-established African-American aesthetic
traditions, from the iterated drumbeat brought here
by men sold into slavery, to the call and response
of gospel, the repeated blues refrain, jazz's
improvisational rifting, and the sampling technique
of rap.
Basquiat's
work, with its ironic use of text--and particularly
its erasure--is the visual equivalent of
"signifying." As Henry Gates elucidates in
his analysis of black literature, Figures
in Black, "the black rhetorical tropes,
subsumed under signifying, would include marking,
loud-talking, testifying, calling out of one's name,
sounding, rapping, playing the dozens, and so on ...
Signifying is a technique of indirect argument or
persuasion, a language of implication ... Repetition
of a form and then inversion of the same through a
process of variation...."
In
Basquiat's paintings, boys never become men, they
become skeletons and skulls. Presence is expressed
as absence--whether it's in the spectral bodies and
disembodied skulls he paints or the words he crosses
out. Basquiat is obsessed with deconstructing the
images and language of his fragmented world. His
work is the ultimate expression of a profound sense
of "no there there," a deep hole in the
soul.
He
had few black friends, even fewer black peers. No
wonder he found his heroes in jazz geniuses like
Charlie Parker. His repeated use of the copyright
sign probably owes as much to Parker as to the
cartoons he obsessively watched on television. (As
with numerous other black musicians who were taken
advantage of by the white music industry, Parker's
failure to copyright his brilliant compositions cost
him his royalties; the record companies profited
from work which he did for the price of a recording
session.) Basquiat always said he wanted to design a
tombstone for Billie Holiday.
Despite
the pointed racial references in his work, Basquiat
was more in touch with white than with black
culture. Like his father, he rarely went out with
black women. His generosity toward a group of young
graffiti writers was, perhaps, one way to assuage
his guilt.
During
his lifetime, he was not embraced by
African-American critics. In an essay in the Whitney
catalogue for the Black
Male show, Greg Tate wrote, "I remember
myself and Vernon Reid being invited to Jean-Michel
Basquiat's loft for a party in 1984, and not even
wanting to meet the man, because he was surrounded
by white people."
Like
many middle-class blacks who came of age during the
Civil Rights movement, Basquiat was stuck in the
crack between two worlds. With the exception of
being bused to one primarily white school, he never
experienced racial segregation. The racism he
constantly encountered was more subtle. He suffered
the indignity of never being able to get a cab. He'd
make a ritual act of it, jumping up and down in the
street, ensuring that the driver would stop only if
the artist were accompanied, as he often was, by a
well-dressed white.
Basquiat
felt like a bum. He pretended he came from the
street, and in the end he went back to the
street--for drugs. It was his way of perpetuating
his feelings as a disenfranchised person--as a son,
as a citizen, and as an artist. If the art world
wanted to cast him as its wild child, Basquiat was
happy to oblige. It is significant that one of his
favorite source books included a dictionary of hobo
signs--and from it he took not only symbols but
poetry. ("Nothing to be gained here.")
His
life and career strongly parallel those of Robert
Thompson, a prodigiously talented black artist who
died in 1966 at the age of twenty-nine. Like
Basquiat, Thompson lived for a while in the
East
Village
, had notoriously excessive appetites, adored jazz,
and was a longtime heroin addict. After his first
one-man show, writes Stanley Crouch, he became
"the black enfant terrible of the art
world." Crouch brings him vividly to life in
his essay "Meteor in a Black Hat":
"His
behavior, aesthetic achievements, and career
successes amused, shocked, entertained, scandalized,
inspired, made jealous and awed. Some describe his
exoticism as contrived, his high-powered, loud and
rowdy behavior as no more than a ploy... he was
known for taking over places when he arrived ... and
for charming his way through situations where racial
animosity bucked against a short leash. Thompson is
recalled as an innocent, a big kid run down on the
fast track he travelled .... "
To
place Basquiat in the historical arc of
African-American art, from the 1700s through the
extraordinary Harlem Renaissance, from Jacob
Lawrence to such outstanding contemporary artists as
Marvin Puryear and David Hammons, is, in a sense, to
do him the ultimate disservice. According to a
friend, painter Arden Scott, "Basquiat was
intent upon being a mainstream artist. He didn't
want to be a black artist. He wanted to be a famous
artist."
But
Basquiat's celebrity owes more than a little to an
almost institutionalized reverse-racism that set him
apart from his peers as an art-world novelty. Says
Kinshasha Conwill, director of the Studio Museum of
Harlem, "Race will remain into the foreseeable
future a major and usually unfortunate, issue. The
fact is, it was anomalous to be an African-American
and get that kind of attention for his art. Other
people did exploit his race and try to make him an
exotic figure."
Like
all artists whose work mirrors their worlds,
Basquiat reflected his--that of a black man in
twentieth-century
America
. Few have done it as successfully. For better or
worse, Jean-Michel Basquiat has become the world's
most famous black artist. To take off on his
painting "Famous Negro Athletes," Basquiat
himself has become an icon: Famous Negro Artist.
Take
someone with the emotional maturity of a child who
aspires to be the Charlie Parker of painting. Place
him in a pressure-cooker art world where quantity
matters more than quality, aggressive art dealers
push prices through the roof, avaricious new
collectors speculate wildly, auction houses create
instant inflation, and the media magnifies the
entire circus through a hyperbolic lens. Add the
race card, drugs, and promiscuity at every level.
Then call it the burnout of an art star.
In
fact, Basquiat's brief life as an artist was a
little bang that attracted its own temporary
universe of powerful planets, whose orbits were in
every way more constant than his own. He was, in a
sense, a cipher; a black hole too dense to
penetrate, whose strange gravitational pull
ultimately--and predictably--caused it to implode.
The
players who instantly recognized the phenomenon of
Jean-Michel Basquiat and knew how to market it were
older, more cynical, and ultimately easier to
analyze than the lonely, alienated, and
disenfranchised artist whose constant need to
produce--out of his own untrammeled creativity,
deep-seated desire for approval, and insatiable
demand for the cash that would buy him drugs--became
their ready source of profit. Basquiat was a canny,
coked-out art-world Candide, with a revolving set of
Panglosses, including the Ur-Pangloss of them all,
Warhol. For Basquiat, dying was a way of never
growing up.
The
story of Jean-Michel Basquiat is not so much the
study of a life as the study of a life style at a
particular moment in the latter half of the
twentieth century. Basquiat's life and death tread
that peculiarly American line where tabloid meets
tragedy. Precisely what energized his art made it
impossible for him to survive the system.
We
live in a culture that continually cannibalizes
itself; Basquiat's life is a modern-day version of
Nathanael West's classic tales of culture run amok, The
Day of the Locust, and, even more to the point, A
Cool Million, in which Lemuel Pitkin, the
American Boy who seeks success in a wildly
capitalistic world, becomes a martyr when he is
assassinated--after first being virtually tom limb
from limb.
Ironically,
given his obsession with anatomy, Basquiat
deconstructed himself. Perhaps his trademark
erasures were his most heartfelt artistic gesture.
©1998
Phoebe Hoban All rights reserved. ISBN:
0-670-85477-8
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