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ARTIST NAME: Jean-Michel Basquiat
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AUCTION RESULTS AND INDEBT INFORMATION ON Jean-Michel Basquiat
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"The only thing the
market liked better than a hot young artist was a dead hot young
artist, and it got one in Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose working life
of about nine years was truncated by a heroin overdose at the age of
twenty-seven. His career, both actual and posthumous, appealed to a
cluster of toxic vulgarities. First, the racist idea of the black as
naif or rhythmic innocent, and of the black artist as
"instinctual," someone outside "mainstream" culture and therefore
not to be rated in its terms: a wild pet for the recently cultivated
collector. Second, a fetish about the freshness of youth, blooming
among the discos of the East Side scene. Third, guilt and political
correctness, which made curators and collectors nervous about
judging the work of any black artist who could be presented as a
"victim." Fourth, art-investment mania. And last, the audience's
goggling appetite for self-destructive talent:
Pollock, Montgomery Clift. All this gunk rolled into a sticky
ball around Basquiat's tiny talent and produced a reputation. "Basquiat's career was
incubated by the short-lived graffiti movement, which started on the
streets and subway cars in the early 1970s, peaked, fell out of
view, began all over again in the 1980s, peaked again, and finally
receded, leaving Basquiat and the amusingly facile Keith Haring as
its only memorable exponents. Unlike Haring, however, Basquiat never
tagged the subways. The son of middle-class Brooklyn parents, he had
a precocious success with his paintings from the start. The key was
not that they were "primitive," but that they were so arty.
Stylistically, they were pastiches of older artists he admired: Cy
Twombly,
Jean Dubuffet. Having no art training, he never tried to deal
with the real world through drawing; he could only scribble and jot,
rehearsing his own stereotypes, his pictorial nouns for "face" or
"body" over and over again. Consequently, though Basquiat's images
look quite vivid and sharp at first sight, and though from time to
time he could bring off an intriguing passage of spiky marks or a
brisk clash of blaring color, the work quickly settles into the
visual monotony of arid overstyling. Its relentless fortissimo is
wearisome. Critics made much of Basquiat's use of sources: vagrant
code-symbols, quotes from
Leonardo or Gray's Anatomy, African bushman art or
Egyptian murals. But these were so scattered, so lacking in plastic
force or conceptual interest, that they seem mere browsing -
homeless representation."The claims made for Basquiat
were absurd and already seem like period pieces. 'Since slavery and
oppression under white supremacy are visible subtexts in Basquiat's
work ,' intoned one essayist in the catalog to his posthumous
retrospective at the Whitney Museum, 'he is as close to
Goya as American painting has ever produced.' Another extolled
his 'punishing regime of self-abuse' as part of 'the disciplines
imposed by the principle of inverse asceticism to which he was so
resolutely committed.' Inverse asceticism, apparently, is PC-speak
for addiction. There was much more in, so to speak, this vein. But
the effort to promote Basquiat into an all-purpose inflatable
martyr-figure, the Little Black Rimbaud of American painting,
remains unconvincing."- From American Visions  , by Robert Hughes |
Jean-Michel Basquiat Books
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