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, Iguess."
--video interview, Tamra Davis and Becky Johnston, 1986
Friday, August 12, 1988. On the sidewalk outside 57 Great JonesStreet, the usual sad lineup of crack addicts slept in the burningsun. Inside the two-story brick building, Jean-Michel Basquiatwas asleep in his huge bed, bathed in blue television light. The airconditioner was broken and the room felt like a microwave oven.The bathroom door was ajar, revealing a glimpse of a black and tanJacuzzi 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'sfavorite punctuation, a copyright sign.
Kelle Inman, Basquiat's twenty-two-year-old girlfriend, was downstairswriting in the journal that Basquiat had given her. He usuallyslept all day, but when he still hadn't come down for breakfast bymidafternoon, Inman got worried. When she looked into the bedroomto check up on him, the heat hit her full in the face, like a wave. ButBasquiat seemed to be sleeping peacefully, so she went back downstairs.She and the housekeeper heard what sounded like loudsnores, but thought nothing of it.
A few hours later, Basquiat's friend Kevin Bray called. He andBasquiat and another friend, Victor Littlejohn, were supposed to goto a Run-D.M.C. concert that evening, and he wanted to make planswith Jean-Michel. Kelle climbed back up the stair's to give Basquiatthe message. This time, she found him stretched on the floor, hishead Jean-Michael on his arm like a child's, a small pool of vomit formingnear his chin.
Inman panicked. She had never seen anyone die, although Basquiat'sdrug binges had made the scenario a constant fear. Now itseemed like the worst had happened. She ran to the phone and calledBray, Littlejohn, and Vrej Baghoomian, Basquiat's last art dealer.
"When I got there," recalls Bray, "Kelle said she had called anambulance. She took me upstairs. Jean-Michel looked like he wascomfortably out cold. He was on the floor, lying against the wall, as ifhe had fallen down and didn't have the strength to get up, and wasjust taking a nap. There was a lot of clear liquid coming out of hismouth. We picked him up and turned him over. We shook him, andwe just kept trying to revive him. It took a long time for the ambulanceto arrive. But for a while, after the guys from the EmergencyMedical Service came, we thought he was going to be okay. Theywere giving him shocks and IV treatment. Victor had to hold Jean-Michelup like this so the IV's would drain," says Bray, stretching hisarms out in a cruciform.
Bray couldn't take it anymore. He went downstairs, where Inman,and two assistants from the Baghoomian gallery, Vera Calloway andHelen Traversi, were trying to stay calm. "We tried to take his pulse.His skin was so hot," says Calloway. Baghoomian called the studiojust as the paramedics arrived. He was in San Francisco and Helenwas forced to act in his stead.
"It was almost like it was some sort of business transaction," saysBray. "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 himoutside. He had this beautiful bubbling red-white foam coming out ofhis mouth."
"We all hoped some miracle would happen," recalls Helen, whobegins to cry at the memory. Outside on the pavement, a small crowdhad gathered in horror and fascination. "I was about to leave on vacationwith my wife," says filmmaker Amos Poe, who was a friend ofthe artist. "We watched as they loaded his body into the ambulance. Isaw his father pull up in a Saab. I kept saying to my wife. `Jean-Michelis dead.' He really lived out that whole destructo legend: Dieyoung, 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 laterautopsy report stated that Basquiat had died from "acute mixed drugintoxication (opiates-cocaine)." In the months before his death, Basquiatclaimed he was doing up to a hundred bags of heroin a day.
Basquiat was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn fivedays later. His father invited only a few of the artist's friends to theclosed-casket funeral at Frank Campbell's; they were outnumberedby the phalanx of art dealers. The heat wave had broken, and itrained on the group gathered at the cemetery to bid Jean-Michelgoodbye. The eulogy was delivered by Citibank art consultant JeffreyDeitch, lending the moment an unintentionally ironic tone.
Blanca Martinez, Basquiat's housekeeper, was struck by the alienatedattitude of the mourners. "They were all standing separately, asif it were an obligation," she says. "They didn't seem to care. Somelooked ashamed." People began to leave the cemetery before the bodywas buried. Ignoring the objections of the gravediggers, Martineztearfully threw a handful of dirt onto the coffin as they lowered it intothe grave.
Basquiat's mother, Matilde, looking dazed, approached Baghoomianto thank him for his help to her son during his last days. GerardBasquiat later admonished his former wife not to talk to the artdealer. The scene was already being set for a bitter battle over theestate of the artist.
The following week, appraisers from Christie's set to work taking inventoryof the contents of the Great Jones Street loft: finished andunfinished paintings, other artists' works (including several dozenWarhols and a piece by William Burroughs), a vintage collection ofMission furniture, a closet full of Armani and Comme des Garcons suits, alibrary of over a thousand videotapes, hundreds of audiocassettes,art books, a carton of the Charlie Parker biography BirdLives!, several bicycles, a number of antique toys, an Everlastpunching bag, six music synthesizers, some African instruments, an Erectorset, and a pair of handcuffs.
There were also a number of paintings in warehouses: followingAndy Warhol's advice, Basquiat had tried to squirrel some of hiswork away from his ever-eager art dealers. According to Christie's,Basquiat had left 917 drawings, 25 sketchbooks, 85 prints, and 171paintings.
Artist Dan Asher walked by his old friend's loft and was astonishedto see a number of Basquiat's favorite things in a Dumpster: hisshoes, his jazz collection, a peculiar lamp made out of driftwood, SamPeckinpah's director's chair. Asher salvaged a few items; he sold thechair to a collector.
It would be another year before Gerard Basquiat ordered a tombstonefor his son. But for several weeks after the artist's death, he wascommemorated by a small shrine some anonymous fan had placed byhis door. Shrouded in lace, it held flowers, votive candles, a pictureof Basquiat, some carefully copied prayers, and a Xerox of a DavidLevine caricature of the artist, complete with a caption: "In an age oflimitless options and limiting fears, he still makes poems and paintingsto evoke his world."
A formal memorial service was finally held at Saint Peter'sChurch in Citicorp Center, on a stormy Saturday in November. Despitethe rain, wind, and bleak gray sky, several hundred peoplecrowded into the church. Behind the pulpit hung a portrait of theartist as a young man, superimposed on one of his faux-primitivepaintings. One by one, his former friends and lovers rememberedBasquiat.
Gray, the band with which Jean-Michel had played at the MuddClub, performed several songs. John Lurie played a saxophonesolo. 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. "Hedisrupted the politics of the art world and insisted that if he had toplay their games, he would make the rules. His images entered thedreams and museums of the exploiters, and the world can never bethe same."
Fab 5 Freddy, who knew Basquiat from his old graffiti days, "interpolated"a poem by Langston Hughes. "This is a song for the geniuschild. Sing it softly, for the song is wild. Sing it softly as ever youcan--lest the song get out of hand. Nobody loves a genius child. Canyou love an eagle, tame or wild? Wild or tame, can you love a monster,of frightening name? Nobody loves a genius child. Free [sic] himand let his soul run wild."
After the service, everyone went to M.K., the bank-turned-nightclubon lower Fifth Avenue. Owned by Jennifer Goode's brother,it was one of Jean-Michel's favorite places. In fact, it was his lastdestination the night before he died. He had come to the club looking forJennifer. Now people stood around the big television set, sippingchampagne and watching a flickering black-and-white video of Basquiat.A photographer from Fame magazine snapped pictures of theknown and not-so-known: the jewelry designer Tina Chow, and hersister, Adele Lutz, David Byrne's wife. Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. Itwas the perfect send-off for the eighties art star; part opening, partwake.
CHAPTER TWO
THE NOT-SO-BRAVE
NEW ART WORLD
Basquiat's life spanned an historic shift in the art world, from Popto Neo-Expressionism, from hip to hype. It was personified byAndy Warhol, the man who was to celebrity what Freud was tothe unconscious. When Basquiat was born in December 1960, thePop decade had just begun. In December 1961, Claes Oldenburg wasshowing household items in "The Store" down on East Second Street;the following summer Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup cans pouredinto America's consciousness when they were put on display in thewindow of Bonwit Teller and in the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles.
Comic books, television, advertising itself; they all became fodderfor the new movement. Mass media was both the new art's subjectand its method of dissemination. Even America's landscape--withits Technicolor billboards--was innately Pop. "Pop art took the insideand put it outside, took the outside and put it inside," Warholwrote in his bible of the era, POPism.
At Leo Castelli's gallery, a bastion of Abstract Expressionism,Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, and JasperJohns were showing paintings of modern detritus; bathroom fixtures,Ben Day-dotted bimbos talking in air balloons, Americanflags, Coke bottles. The Museum of Modern Art's symposium on Popart, held in December 1962, included an early champion; MetropolitanMuseum curator Henry Geldzahler, a Warhol intimate who wouldbecome Mayor Ed Koch's cultural commissioner of New York. Geldzahlerwould also be instrumental in helping launch Jean-MichelBasquiat's career.
The sixties also brought a whole new breed of collectors into theforefront. Cab-fleet owner Robert Scull and his wife, Ethel, becameavid collectors of the new art. One of Scull's passions was to discoverthe work on his own, buying right out of the artist's studio. The Scullsalso liked to socialize with the, artists they collected, throwing hugeparties at their home on Long Island. This would also be a favoriteactivity of the nouveau riche collectors of the eighties, who seemed tocrave the kind of high produced by being in close proximity to theArtist.
Pop art planted the seeds of the Neo-Expressionist art of theeighties--spawning its aesthetics and hype. Pop is "doing the easiestthing," Warhol had written. "Anybody could do anything." But artwas also "just another job," one that could be turned, he soondemonstrated, into a moneymaking machine. Warhol took an Americanclassic, the assembly-line, and applied it to art. He made nobones about it; he called his studio the Factory. Thousands of kidspouring out of art school with Bachelor of Fine Art degrees in the1970s followed his lead.
They flooded into New York from all over the country in the middle tolate 1970s, a new generation of would-be rock stars, artists, dancers,and actors. It was still possible to find cheap apartments in AlphabetCity 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 youngpeople with multicolored Mohawks and safety-pinned clothes seemedto have taken over the East Village--then still a scary neighborhoodfull of shooting galleries. CBGB's on the Bowery became a mecca forthe new bands: the Ramones, Television, the Talking Heads. Punk-rockboutiques 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 andthe subsequent New Wave movements that quickly took over were awelcome antidote to the sterile Conceptual and Minimalist art thathad numbed the art scene during the post-Pop decade, boring bothcritics and collectors. Even slam-dancing was preferable to the mindlessthrob of Saturday Night Fever music pulsing in the discos.
Like the sixties, this was a multimedia event, amplified by anEnglish invasion of fashion and music that crisscrossed the Atlanticand was transmuted in Manhattan. It had its drugs of choice; insteadof getting stoned on marijuana, speeding on amphetamines, or trippingon LSD, people snorted coke the way the stars in Godard filmssucked on cigarettes, or got into cool, strung out heroin. The Sex Pistolsreplaced the Beatles; cute Paul McCartney became decadentJohnny Rotten, dressed in torn, black rags instead of psychedelic tie-dye.Johnny Rotten gave way to the robotic Devo and Klaus Nomiand 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 atits core. It was as if the veiled commercialism of such historic sold-outevents as the rock musical Hair or Woodstock had been strippedof any pretext of politics. No one raised an eyebrow when ex-radicaland Chicago 7 kingpin Jerry Rubin became a stockbroker and beganto throw networking parties at the Underground.
There was also no generation gap: from the start, adults began toexploit the obvious possibilities. The late seventies paved the way forthe eighties, which celebrated the materialism the sixties had rebelledagainst. New Wave everything from fashion to graphics wassoon 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 downtownart scene was the marketing of the graffiti movement, which galvanizedthe art world in the late seventies and was completely passeby 1983. For a brief moment the inner-city artists, whose work hadbeen followed for years by transit cops, not critics, were the darlingsof Fifty-seventh Street and SoHo. But the "limousine liberals"--upscaledealers and pseudo radical collectors--soon got bored withbaby-sitting and found some new neo movement to market.
Real estate played a major role in the new Bohemia and its shiftingboundaries; as one area became gentrified, artists migrated tothe next new place. At this point, SoHo, the industrial area southof Houston Street, was still full of textile outlets, floor-sanding companies,and riveters--and lofts that artists could live in under theArtist in Residence (A.I.R.) rental regulations. There were few, ifany, residential amenities--Dean and DeLuca was just a tiny littlegourmet store. And despite the growing artist population, by Fifty-seventhStreet gallery standards, the neighborhood was still practicallythe Wild West. But by 1979, when Julian Schnabel, one of thefirst Neo-Expressionist art stars, had his first show at the Mary BooneGallery on West Broadway, the cross-pollination between the EastVillage and SoHo was in full bloom. Within the next few years, SoHowould evolve into the Madison Avenue of the downtown scene.
By the end the seventies, a whole group of downtown clubshad sprung up--from the Mudd Club on White Street in TriBeCa toClub 57 on St. Mark's Place, to Danceteria on Twenty-third Street,raunchy parodies of the fabulous Studio 54 where Warhol and hiscelebrity cronies--Bianca and Halston and Calvin and Brooke--werehanging out, with one big difference. People didn't just dance and dodrugs and hob-nob in these clubs: they were venues for performanceart, underground films, New Wave music. The Talking Heads--art studentsturned musicians--were paradigmatic of the scene. Artists weremixing up their media; music, film, painting, and fashion were recombiningin innovative ways. From fashion to music, television was a centralreference point for this burgeoning baby-boomer culture.
By early 1979, Jean-Michel Basquiat had established himselfas an artistic persona: SAMO, the author of cryptic sayings scrawledon public spaces all over Manhattan--including, strategically, nearSoHo's newest galleries. It was the beginning of his art career, and itsegued neatly with the "discovery" of graffiti. At the time, it wasconvenient, but Basquiat had no intention of being lumped into a categorywith a bunch of kids who bombed trains. In fact, Basquiat wasnot 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 neverdrew on subways; certainly the stars of Wild Style, Charlie Ahearn'sgraffiti film of the time, didn't consider Basquiat a real member oftheir group. Ultimately, Basquiat would be the only black artist tosurvive the graffiti label, and find a permanent place as a blackpainter in a white art world.
Basquiat's nascent career coincided with the advent of a major art-worldrevival, from the tiny storefront galleries of the East Village toSoHo's expansionist West Broadway to the suddenly crowded auctionhouses. For the first time in a over a decade, a new art movement,Neo-Expressionism, had seduced both critics and collectors. Paintingwas back; from Julian Schnabel to Susan Rothenberg, artistswere reveling in the return of figurativism.
But what radically changed the art world by the time Basquiatentered the scene was money. In the early 1980s, Wall Street's bullmarket engendered an interesting offspring: SoHo's bull market. Thenew money of the eighties was increasingly invested into art. By 1983,the art market in New York alone, was estimated at $2 billion. Gallerydealers became power players, barely distinguishable in lingoand lifestyle from their Wall Street clientele. Banks began acceptingart as collateral for loans. Corporations began stockpiling importantcontemporary-art collections. Every weekend, SoHo was clogged witha parade of art lovers slumming at openings. At auction houses,packed rooms applauded as records were set for everything from vanGogh's "Irises"--$53.9 million--to $17 million for "False Start" byJasper Johns.
Chauffeured cars disgorged fur-coated women into tiny storefrontgalleries in the bowels of the East Village. Eugene and BarbaraSchwartz epitomized the new collectors. A wealthy publisher of how-tobooks, Schwartz and his wife spent most of the mid-eighties shoppingfor art every Saturday, hitting the hottest galleries in the EastVillage and SoHo. Collectors like Charles Saatchi, head of the multinationaladvertising conglomerate Saatchi & Saatchi, acquired adreadful power: the ability to make and break an artist overnight, asthe advertising baron did with the work of Italian painter SandroChia, 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. TheWhitney's Biennial became a launching pad for the latest stars. Collectorslike Don and Mera Rubell soon developed a ritual: hundredscrowded into their art-filled Upper East Side town house for their Biennialopening-night party.
In the eighties, the bifurcated role of art as a vehicle for stardomand art as raw commodity reached its zenith. For the contemporaryartist, success meant instant recognition; magazine covers and Gapads, not just museum shows. And the new art collectors, unlike thosewho invested in junk bonds, could at least pretend they had put theirmoney into something of value.
Warhol, a wigged-out psychic, had presaged the whole thing. InPOPism, he spelled it out tot the next generation: "To be successfulas an artist, you have to have your work shown by a good gallery forthe same reason, say, that Dior never sold his originals from a counterin Woolworth's. It's a matter of marketing, among other things. If aguy has, say, a few thousand dollars to spend on a painting . . . Hewants to buy something that's going to go up and up in value, and theonly way that can happen is with a good gallery, one that looks out forthe artist, promotes him, and sees to it that his work is shown in theright 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, ifyou are not promoted right, you won't be one of those rememberednames."
Fame and Greed: the Twin Peaks of the eighties art world. Thecareer of Jean-Michel Basquiat cashed in on both. Not surprisingly,he managed to become Warhol's protege along the way. As an addedbonus, a kind of historical footnote to the cynical decade, Jean-MichelBasquiat was black--the first contemporary African-American artistto become an international star.
Basquiat's black identity is manifest throughout his art. Not overtlypolitical, his sense of what it means to be a black man in contemporaryAmerica couldn't be more clearly conveyed, whether it's in thegrinning heads in "Hollywood Africans," or the poignant tribute tohis idol Charlie Parker, "Charles the First" or the ironic "UndiscoveredGenius of the Mississippi Delta."
Many of his stylistic trademarks are themselves a recognizablepart of the continuum of well-established African-American aesthetictraditions, from the iterated drumbeat brought here by men sold intoslavery, 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 itserasure--is the visual equivalent of "signifying." As Henry Gateselucidates in his analysis of black literature, Figures in Black, "theblack rhetorical tropes, subsumed under signifying, would includemarking, loud-talking, testifying, calling out of one's name, sounding,rapping, playing the dozens, and so on ... Signifying is a techniqueof indirect argument or persuasion, a language of implication ...Repetition of a form and then inversion of the same through a processof variation...."
In Basquiat's paintings, boys never become men, they becomeskeletons and skulls. Presence is expressed as absence--whether it'sin the spectral bodies and disembodied skulls he paints or the wordshe crosses out. Basquiat is obsessed with deconstructing the imagesand language of his fragmented world. His work is the ultimate expressionof a profound sense of "no there there," a deep hole in thesoul.
He had few black friends, even fewer black peers. No wonder hefound his heroes in jazz geniuses like Charlie Parker. His repeateduse of the copyright sign probably owes as much to Parker as to thecartoons he obsessively watched on television. (As with numerousother black musicians who were taken advantage of by the white musicindustry, Parker's failure to copyright his brilliant compositionscost him his royalties; the record companies profited from workwhich he did for the price of a recording session.) Basquiat alwayssaid he wanted to design a tombstone for Billie Holiday.
Despite the pointed racial references in his work, Basquiat wasmore in touch with white than with black culture. Like his father, herarely went out with black women. His generosity toward a group ofyoung graffiti writers was, perhaps, one way to assuage his guilt.
During his lifetime, he was not embraced by African-Americancritics. In an essay in the Whitney catalogue for the Black Maleshow, Greg Tate wrote, "I remember myself and Vernon Reid beinginvited to Jean-Michel Basquiat's loft for a party in 1984, and noteven wanting to meet the man, because he was surrounded by whitepeople."
Like many middle-class blacks who came of age during the CivilRights movement, Basquiat was stuck in the crack between twoworlds. With the exception of being bused to one primarily whiteschool, he never experienced racial segregation. The racism he constantlyencountered was more subtle. He suffered the indignity ofnever being able to get a cab. He'd make a ritual act of it, jumping upand down in the street, ensuring that the driver would stop only if theartist 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 ofperpetuating his feelings as a disenfranchised person--as a son, as acitizen, and as an artist. If the art world wanted to cast him as its wildchild, Basquiat was happy to oblige. It is significant that one of hisfavorite source books included a dictionary of hobo signs--and fromit 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 oftwenty-nine. Like Basquiat, Thompson lived for a while in the EastVillage, had notoriously excessive appetites, adored jazz, and was alongtime heroin addict. After his first one-man show, writes StanleyCrouch, he became "the black enfant terrible of the art world." Crouchbrings him vividly to life in his essay "Meteor in a Black Hat":
"His behavior, aesthetic achievements, and career successesamused, shocked, entertained, scandalized, inspired, made jealousand awed. Some describe his exoticism as contrived, his high-powered,loud and rowdy behavior as no more than a ploy... he was known fortaking over places when he arrived ... and for charming his waythrough situations where racial animosity bucked against a shortleash. Thompson is recalled as an innocent, a big kid run down onthe fast track he travelled .... "
To place Basquiat in the historical arc of African-American art,from the 1700s through the extraordinary Harlem Renaissance, fromJacob Lawrence to such outstanding contemporary artists as MarvinPuryear and David Hammons, is, in a sense, to do him the ultimatedisservice. According to a friend, painter Arden Scott, "Basquiat wasintent upon being a mainstream artist. He didn't want to be a blackartist. He wanted to be a famous artist."
But Basquiat's celebrity owes more than a little to an almostinstitutionalized reverse-racism that set him apart from his peers as anart-world novelty. Says Kinshasha Conwill, director of the Studio Museumof Harlem, "Race will remain into the foreseeable future a majorand usually unfortunate, issue. The fact is, it was anomalous tobe an African-American and get that kind of attention for his art.Other people did exploit his race and try to make him an exoticfigure."
Like all artists whose work mirrors their worlds, Basquiat reflectedhis--that of a black man in twentieth-century America. Fewhave done it as successfully. For better or worse, Jean-Michel Basquiathas become the world's most famous black artist. To take off onhis painting "Famous Negro Athletes," Basquiat himself has becomean icon: Famous Negro Artist.
Take someone with the emotional maturity of a child who aspires tobe the Charlie Parker of painting. Place him in a pressure-cooker artworld where quantity matters more than quality, aggressive art dealerspush prices through the roof, avaricious new collectors speculatewildly, auction houses create instant inflation, and the media magnifiesthe entire circus through a hyperbolic lens. Add the race card,drugs, and promiscuity at every level. Then call it the burnout of anart star.
In fact, Basquiat's brief life as an artist was a little bang thatattracted its own temporary universe of powerful planets, whose orbitswere in every way more constant than his own. He was, in a sense, acipher; a black hole too dense to penetrate, whose strange gravitationalpull ultimately--and predictably--caused it to implode.
The players who instantly recognized the phenomenon of Jean-MichelBasquiat and knew how to market it were older, more cynical,and ultimately easier to analyze than the lonely, alienated, anddisenfranchised artist whose constant need to produce--out of his ownuntrammeled creativity, deep-seated desire for approval, and insatiabledemand for the cash that would buy him drugs--became their readysource of profit. Basquiat was a canny, coked-out art-world Candide,with a revolving set of Panglosses, including the Ur-Pangloss of themall, Warhol. For Basquiat, dying was a way of never growing up.
The story of Jean-Michel Basquiat is not so much the study ofa life as the study of a life style at a particular moment in the latterhalf of the twentieth century. Basquiat's life and death tread that peculiarlyAmerican line where tabloid meets tragedy. Precisely whatenergized his art made it impossible for him to survive the system.
We live in a culture that continually cannibalizes itself; Basquiat'slife is a modern-day version of Nathanael West's classic talesof culture run amok, The Day of the Locust, and, even more to thepoint, A Cool Million, in which Lemuel Pitkin, the American Boywho seeks success in a wildly capitalistic world, becomes a martyrwhen he is assassinated--after first being virtually tom limb fromlimb.
Ironically, given his obsession with anatomy, Basquiat deconstructedhimself. Perhaps his trademark erasures were his mostheartfelt artistic gesture.
Continues...
Excerpted from Basquiatby Phoebe Hoban Copyright © 1999 by Phoebe Hoban. Excerpted by permission.
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