JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT spent most of his career as a has-been—a remarkable achievement if you consider that he was only 27 when he OD’d on heroin. In the decade prior to that, however, he had moved from the periphery of the art world to its very center before slipping, by swift degrees, into marginalized irrelevance. For most of the Eighties the only opinion you really needed if you wanted to sound informed about contemporary painting (and who didn’t?) was that Basquiat’s latest productions lacked the spontaneity and freshness of his earlier works. His paintings continued to sell and he was still being written about, but the listless gaze of the art world was now looking for fresher meat.
His overdose four years ago changed all that. Death had turned him into a finite commodity. Death might not alter the quality of his work, but it certainly affected their quantity. Suddenly the works of this all-too-prolific artist started to feel rare indeed. SoHo awoke to what had been lost. No more would the wild child of the art world be shooting up in Annina Nosei’s basement. No more would he be spilling coffee on critics or vomiting into the latrines of the Mudd Club. There was the vague certitude that they, whoever they were, had done this to him, that he had been done in by a cold, uncaring world that hated youth and genius and all that. His death cried out for noisy, fulsome piaculation, and the stream of eulogies has been flowing ever since.
Comments