Throwback Thursday: Basquiat, Revisited

Talented? Yes. Exploited? Yes. Role model? No. Tragedy? Yes.

 

Jean-Michel Basquiat is to art what Jimi Hendrix was to music. Rare, talented, original, producing remarkable work, and dead by age 27, by his own self-destructive instability. I first heard of him through the film Basquiat, starring notables Dennis Hopper, Gary Oldman, Christopher Walken and David Bowie. Something about the film was off-putting at the time I began watching it and I turned it off in about twenty minutes. But the name stuck.

As a regular reader of the ArtDaily Newsletter, the recurring themes remind you of who and what are important in the art scene. Sotheby's, Museums of Modern Art, Picasso and Warhol all receive their due portions. And then there's Basquiat. Black. Puerto Rican. Fifteen year old runaway. Graffiti artist who lived hard, died of a heroin overdose like his heroes.

I have been reading Phoebe Hoban's uncomplimentary and thoroughly researched bio called Basquiat: A Quick Killing In Art. I say "uncomplimentary" because it is essentially an honest telling of his life and of those who exploited him. There are a lot of not so pretty pictures in the mix. The book opens with his overdose, an acute mix of heroin and cocaine. At the time he claims to have been doing up to one hundred bags of heroin a day.

In order to properly shed light on a life, one must see the context of that life as well, and Hoban's work is equally devoted to shedding light on the New York art scene. Beneath all the glam is "a pressure-cooker art scene 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."

Hoban goes on to write that "Basquiat's brief life was a little bang that attracted its own temporary universe of powerful planets, whose orbits were in every way more constant than his own."

"The players who instantly recognized the phenomenon of Jean-Michael 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."

Sound like the troubled street walkers who put out only to have money for another fix. Except the latter are simply used, whereas Basquiat's name has been elevated to the theater marquis, his paintings worth millions each.

His story again raises questions. What gives art its value? If the life is ugly and the work is beautiful, is it beautiful art? If Basquiat had had a religious conversion, survived the drug scene, repudiated Warhol and stopped "playing the art dealers' games" would his work be worth less today? If Basquiat had ceased being a sexually-charged vagabond infecting women with VD, settled into a monogamous relationship, raised a family and made art for twenty five more years, would they have made a major film about him, canonizing his free spirited "life without boundaries"?

Let me say here that I think his paintings are incredible. I enjoy the vibrant colors, the bold statements, the scope of his work. If he had simply been a middle class art major and produced the same paintings, would he have been so lionized?

I remember reading about creative people who were afraid to get therapy because they somehow tied their creative achievements to their unbalanced, inwardly disturbed state-of-mind. Where does this idea come from that creativity and madness go hand-in-hand?

 

Related Links
Was Robert Hughes Right About Basquiat?

Andy Warhol's Elephant in the (Basquiat) Rooom

Andy Warhol's Elephant in the (Basquiat) Room

Thursday afternoon I was able to make time for the Andy Warhol Museum while in Pittsburgh. The Pirates were playing at Heinz Stadium as I passed through the heart of the city. Finding a parking spot was easily achieved and I was soon inside, purchasing a ticket at the reception area. Tickets are half price for seniors, which turned out to be an unexpected perk, more than covering the cost of parking.

As noted in yesterday's post, the layout of the seven-story museum is chronological. You begin at the top and work your way down. Each level unfolds a more developed aspect of Andy Warhol's career explorations, from ad agency commercial illustration/design to Pop Art and screen printing, fascination with celebrities, film making and even journalism. And yes, there is a room dedicated to the Andy Warhol Screen Test in which museum-goers can also do a screen test.

This blog post is devoted to the Elephant here pictured, which stands on a small pedestal in the Warhol-Basquiat Gallery. It's been famously observed that the two artists did a lot of collaboration and the results were often dramatic. It would have been interesting to be a fly on the wall as these two created the works here.

When I entered the space, I initially scanned, then panned, the elephant. My eyes were drawn to the Warhol-Basquiat collaborations, bold and brassy, dramatic and uninhibited.

After circling the perimeter of the room, engaging each of the pieces (most of them mixed media) I returned to the elephant, and upon noticing the falling man pattern that spilled over the paper mache creature, I seemed to take more pleasure in the piece. It wasn't just a zebra-striped endangered creature.

As for the subject matter, Warhol had in 1983 produced a series of prints featuring 10 endangered species for Ron and Freyda Feldman. In other words, the sculpture was not unrelated to a theme he'd already shown interest in.

"Elephant" (Side view)

Here are a couple of the Warhol/Basquiat pieces that were hanging in this room.

Collaboration (Chairs/African)

Collaboration (Year of the Rat, Rodent (TM))

Meantime, art goes on all around you. Engage it.

Related Links
Basquiat and Warhol: Exploitative or even-handed relationship?
Was Robert Hughes Right About Basquiat?
Warhol's Elephant 293

Flashback Friday: Four August Stories from Six Years Ago --The Creative Class, Basquiat, Robert Hughes and Olympic Sex

This summer I have been taking an inventory of all my blog posts during the past 11 years. It's been an interesting investigation, rummaging through 4000 blogs posts along with some of the comments they engendered. Here are the intros to five of these from August 2012.

Fall of the Creative Class
August 1, 2012
Last week a Facebook friend posted a thought-provoking critique of Richard Florida's Rise of the Creative Class. For those who care about these things, and I realize a lot of folks don't, the article addresses the current relationship between the arts and contemporary culture, and challenges certain beliefs regarding the economic value of art in society. The article, by Frank Bures, is titled "The Price of Everything." It's popularity may be due to the fact that it attempts to knock over one of our newly erected sacred cows.
READ MORE

Olympic Sex
August 2, 2012
I intended to write about the "art" of the Olympics this morning, but I have a friend who mentioned that he doesn't read my blog as much as he used to now that I write so much and so frequently about art. If it says "Art" in the title he skips that day. So today I'm throwing him a bone, something more in keeping with the prurient interests of our fans while remaining wholly up-to-the-minute and relevant culturally.
READ MORE

Was Robert Hughes Right About Basquiat?
August 9, 2012
Yesterday it was announced that former Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes passed away at 74. His perch at Time and a television series that sought to explain the development and history of modern art all served to make him better known than most art critics. L.A. Times writer Mike Boehm called him "a sometimes lacerating reviewer who may have commanded a larger audience than any other art critic in history."
READ MORE

The Leisure Class and the Arts
August 17, 2012
Every now and then I make observations that I do not know fully how to process. One of these is in relation to our notions of wealth and poverty, and especially wealth and the arts.

It occurred to me as I was reading the diaries of Andre Gide that his "situation" was far different than mine. The Nobel Prize winning French author produced 80 books, many of which were self-published small circulation pieces that were shared with friends. Some diary entries mentioned playing piano for six hours during the day. When he traveled to Tunisia he had fourteen large trunks of belongings. In short, he was not like me. He was from a different class of people.
READ MORE

* * * *
I discovered another place where there is art on display. Check out the Protein Pub in the Board of Trade Building across the street from the Y on First Street.

THIS WEEK 
Mark your calendar for the Downtown Duluth Arts Walk (Friday) the a new show at the Barn in Wrenshall called Free Range Trials. FYI Eris Vafias is the August artist of the month at Beaners. Check out my own paintings at Goin' Postal in Superior and Art on the Planet. Both these Tower Avenue venues deserve more traffic from the Duluth side of the bay. To quote Karin Kraemer, whose Duluth Pottery space in Lincoln Park looks fab, "It's just a bridge. Get over it."

Meantime, art goes on all around you.  Engage it.

Talking Art with the Tweed's Bill Shipley

 Beginning the first Tuesday of October the Tweed Museum initiated a new program called Tweevenings in which guest speakers would discuss works from the Tweed collection and help the public gain a greater sense of art appreciation. Bill Shipley, who spent his career in the midst of the burgeoning New York arts scene from 1974 into the 21st century, was the presenter that first Tweed evening, discussing a sculptural aluminum relief by abstract artist Charles Biederman called “Redwing #29.” This was my first encounter with Mr. Shipley, and I’ve already concluded he is both a rich resource and welcome addition to our arts community.

EN: You had a friend who had a studio at a place where Hans Hoffman once had his studio. What was it like for a young Midwestern art student to be living in the heart of the New York art scene?

BS: When I think of moving from the Midwest to New York I remembered visiting the city many times before moving there. Once you live there however it is a very different place and you find that your neighborhood is a little like a small town within the scale of Manhattan. It was like that in the East Village and on Sullivan Street where I first lived. My next door neighbor was Marcia Tucker but I didn't know who she was until later when the New Museum got going. I had friends who worked for her in the early days.

St. Mark's Church in the Bowery was a vital part of the art and literary scene in those days. My apartment was almost across the street from it and when it burned badly we all mourned the loss. It was rebuilt but never quite the same after. And the neighborhood changed as New York University took over more blocks. Always though the artists led the way for the development and gentrification of the surrounding blocks and I would say that the biggest changes that I witnessed in the New York art world came from artists and galleries who were pioneers in SoHo and Lower Broadway and later in Chelsea.

EN: You had the privilege of being in the center of the New York art scene right after the Pop Art revolution had shattered all the rules. In what ways did the art world change over the thirty years you were there?

BS: In the 1970's and 1980's I could visit every single gallery in New York at least once in the art season. I would go to SoHo on Friday afternoons and then Madison Avenue and 57th street galleries on Saturdays. When I left the city in 2000 it would have been an impossible task. By then Chelsea alone had over 300 or more galleries. I also saw the development of what I call museum level galleries like Gagosian and Pace. Many dealers could open a gallery to represent small niches in the art market and find it profitable. Galleries devoted to just one part of the history of photography are a good example of this.

In Minneapolis, especially in the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District and the Northrup King Seed Building, similar things are happening now. In April I had my first show in a commercial gallery there at Carbon Chroma Gallery. Right now Steve Sugarman at Gallery 13 at 811 LaSalle in downtown Minneapolis has a few of my recent paintings. They are acrylic works on an abstract landscape theme - horizons and sky ideas mostly inspired by Lake Superior's variable atmosphere.

The Tweed Museum of Art is my second "home" so to speak as I continue to give tours of the museum collection. I have also taught classes on art history and the history of the Tweed Collection for University seniors at UMD. I hope that the students I meet now remember me as a mentor and fellow artist in the same way that I was helped by Myron Stout and Jack Tworkov and Judith Rothschild when I was starting out. The artists from Provincetown continue to inspire me now – from some forty years ago. Many other artists from that time I did not know personally but their presence nonetheless kept me going and kept me working and re-working my pictures. I can now look back on what I was living for and for what I still see ahead of me.

EN: Why is it important for us to support the arts as a community? 

BS: It is troubling that a question like that should even be asked in our society. A civilization and a country is defined by its laws and its art. No way to get around it. For a long time I have thought that art history should be part of a school's core curriculum -- from primary school age onward. What is really awful is that too often a school cuts art and music and theatre and dance and writing and poetry completely, or relegates it to an after-school program. No excuse for that.

Art was as central to the life of the students at the private school where I taught in New York as it is to New York City itself. As educators we make a big mistake in not realizing how crucial art is to a child's development at every age. The emphasis lately on testing and math and science is very short-sighted to say the least. The "will" to make something, to build something, to paint something or write something is at the heart and soul of every one of us. We can decide to support it or not but the consequences in both situations are real and tangible, for better or worse.

EN: Your time in New York overlapped Basquiat's rise to significance and sudden end. You mentioned crossing paths with Warhol on more than a few occasions. What's your take on Basquiat?

BS: I was not a part of Andy Warhol's inner circle but I knew people who were. At a lavish party in the downtown loft of the artist Arman and his wife Corice I noticed two large portraits of Mr. Arman and his wife painted by Warhol. My last sighting of Warhol just before his death was at a soda fountain coffee shop place just off Astor Place. As I walked by I saw him sitting by himself at a table by the window eating a large ice cream sundae. As for Basquiat (who was later mentored by Warhol) I always think of the importance of having children in museums at early ages because Basquiat literally grew up inside the Brooklyn Museum. But very talented young artists often fall into traps they cannot get out of and it takes their life way too early.

EN: Thank you, Bill. And it's good to hear that you're still very active in your studio. Keep it going.

Was Robert Hughes Right About Basquiat?

Yesterday it was announced that former Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes passed away at 74. His perch at Time and a television series that sought to explain the development and history of modern art all served to make him better known than most art critics. L.A. Times writer Mike Boehm called him "a sometimes lacerating reviewer who may have commanded a larger audience than any other art critic in history."

Boehm's obituary tribute is packed with insight and a fitting summary of his life.

The critic rose to star status by introducing television audiences to the development of 20th century modernism in "The Shock of the New: A Personal View," an eight-hour series that ran in Britain in 1980 and the United States in 1981. Hughes became known for blasting new art-world luminaries such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, and Jeff Koons, artists he felt exemplified the triumph of the marketplace and celebrity over the modernist creative standards he cherished.

His primary complaint: popularity shouldn’t be equated with quality. Boehm's piece goes on to say...

After Basquiat, who helped spearhead the entrance of graffiti-influenced painting into the museum world, died in 1988 of a heroin overdose, Hughes' critique ran in the New Republic under the headline, "Requiem for a Featherweight." Basquiat, he wrote, was "a small, untrained talent caught in the buzz saw of artworld promotion, absurdly overrated by dealers, collectors, and no doubt to their future embarrassment, by critics."

Of this I will say more in a minute.

Hughes’ series, when I watched it this spring, stimulated a whole range of thoughts that coupled with other inputs including this one from Ken Burns’ Jazz when telling Artie Shaw's story.

The basic truth, Artie Shaw concluded, is that popular music has little or nothing to do with musical values at all. “I still wanted to play music and the audience was saying, ‘Play what you’re playing. Over and over. We like that.’ They never could understand that what they liked was something I did on my way to getting better. That record that they liked… became a millstone, became an albatross around my neck.”

So one question I have is this: was Jean-Michel Basquiat doing graffiti art on the way to getting better at developing and expressing a vision? Or was it a means to another end: more cash for stash? As Basquiat biographer Phoebe Hoban demonstrates, Basquiat was exploited, and others became millionaires from that exploitation.

Hoban begins one of her chapters with a pointed Robert Hughes remark. “What strip mining is to nature, the art market has become to culture.” Quantity is what made people rich, and fast. When Picasso died in 1973 a journalist declared that Picasso had produced 4,000 masterpieces in his lifetime. Warhol retorted, “I can produce 4,000 masterpieces in a day.” Indeed, the formula was a good one for both Warhol and Basquiat, the veteran cynic and the fresh face from the streets.

The art world isn’t the only scene that got bent in the Eighties by the influx of capital. Sports had become equally corrupted. In his last book before passing Howard Cosell stated that sports gambling was a 250 billion dollar a year business. Losers get exploited to line the pockets of bookies and gaming houses.

Even collegiate sports has been stained by it. College football is big business and the schools know it. A primary reason the Penn State scandal failed to come to light sooner than it did was because so much was at stake. Penn State's reputation had to be preserved in order for the golden milk to keep flowing.

It has frequently been noted that art can often be a mirror of the times. H.R. Rookmaaker takes this premise as a given in his Modern Art and the Death of a Culture. For Hughes, the whole art scene itself served as a mirror of something bigger than itself, and his magnification lens explored every detail of it.

On the other hand, what if Hughes was wrong about Basquiat? I find his paintings fascinating, liberated, original. How important is the training Hughes references in his critique? Can training override instinct and ruin originality by firming up the lines that we’re not permitted the color outside of?

I really don’t have answers, just more questions, some of which might never have occurred to me had it not been for Robert Hughes.

Basquiat

Talented? Yes. Exploited? Yes. Role model? No. Tragedy? Yes.

Jean-Michel Basquiat is to art what Jimi Hendrix was to music. Rare, talented, original, producing remarkable work, and dead by age 27, by his own self-destructive instability. I first heard of him through the film Basquiat, starring notables Dennis Hopper, Gary Oldman, Christopher Walken and David Bowie. Something about the film was off-putting at the time I began watching it and I turned it off in about twenty minutes. But the name stuck.

As a regular reader of the ArtDaily Newsletter, the recurring themes remind you of who and what are important in the art scene. Sotheby's, Museums of Mordern Art, Picasso and Warhol all receive their due portions. And then there's Basquiat. Black. Puerto Rican. Fifteen year old runaway. Graffiti artist who lived hard, died of a heroin overdose like his heroes.

I have been reading Phoebe Hoban's uncomplimentary and thoroughly researched bio called Basquiat: A Quick Killing In Art. I say "uncomplimentary" because it is essentially an honest telling of his life and of those who exploited him. There are a lot of not so pretty pictures in the mix. The book opens with his overdose, an acute mix of heroin and cocaine. At the time he claims to have been doing up to one hundred bags of heroin a day.

In order to properly shed light on a life, one must see the context of that life as well, and Hoban's work is equally devoted to shedding light on the New York art scene. Beneath all the glam is "a pressure-cooker art scene 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."

Hoban goes on to write that "Basquiat's brief life was a little bang that attracted its own temporary universe of powerful planets, whose orbits were in every way more constant than his own."

"The players who instantly recognized the phenomenon of Jean-Michael 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."

Sound like the troubled street walkers who put out only to have money for another fix. Except the latter are simply used, whereas Basquiat's name has been elevated to the theater marquis, his paintings worth millions each.

His story again raises questions. What gives art its value? If the life is ugly and the work is beautiful, is it beautiful art? If Basquiat had had a religious conversion, survived the drug scene, repudiated Warhol and stopped "playing the art dealers' games" would his work be worth less today? If Basquiat had ceased being a sexually-charged vagabond infecting women with VD, settled into a monogamous relationship, raised a family and made art for twenty five more years, would they have made a major film about him, canonizing his free spirited "life without boundaries"?

Let me say here that I think his paintings are incredible. I enjoy the vibrant colors, the bold statements, the scope of his work. If he had simply been a middle class art major and produced the same paintings, would he have been so lionized?

I remember reading about creative people who were afraid to get therapy because they somehow tied their creative achievements to their unbalance, inwardly disturbed state-of-mind. Where does this idea come from that creativity and madness go hand-in-hand?

Till next...