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Why does Jean-Michel Basquiat mean so much to us?
Since so many people are reacting to the Tiffany’s ad with Beyonce and Jay-Z posing in front of a Basquiat painting, am re-sharing this story I wrote about him for the Miami Herald in August, 2016. I knew Basquiat a tiny bit in the80's, and was part of the downtown scene that embraced him and where he rose up as an artist, so I bring that experience to this piece.
My story deals with much of what’s brought up by the Tiffany ad: the complicated, expanding conversation that Basquiat provokes around art, value, commodification, pop culture, race/ism, and why he fascinates us more and more as time goes on. I’m repelled by the expanding commercialization of his image — and images. How he’s become a generic emblem of rebellion. His trademark crown on t-shirts. And yet I also think the way he’s become such a powerful emblem is as much a part of his legacy as his art.
(I was, fwiw, the last arts writer on staff at the Herald when I wrote this; I was laid off eight months later.)
Dead art icon’s notebooks offer clues to his genius
Few conventional artworks appear in the Jean-Michel Basquiat show, “Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks,” at the Pérez Art Museum Miami now. Instead, torn pages of cheap, lined paper, filled with the artist’s scrawled notes and drawings, are lined up across the walls, a reverently framed trail of…
