On the occasion of the Basquiat painting of a skull titled "Untitled" selling for $110 million, The New Yorker's art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, checks in with an appreciation of the artist.
Let’s take a moment to be nauseated by the price paid, which attests to the obscene amount of excess wealth sloshing around in the world today. Now let’s ignore it. A more worthwhile question is whether Basquiat rates high in valuations of recent art apart from the pecuniary. I think that he does.
Read the full piece here.
6 comments:
A child could paint as well without commanding the Millions of dollars and attention.
Basquiat rates as high as anyone else in modern art.
However, I'm almost certain that $110M is not coming from nor going to anyone that looks like Basquiat, or moves in the world he grew up and filtered his talent in. Someone else will eventually pay more than that just to keep flipping the numbers game for one-upmanship prestige points and the money will remain circulating in the same exclusive club as before. That's what's really nauseating.
If dude were alive today, he'd be fine with keeping $1M and putting the other $109M towards raising up the lives and opportunities of other artists like himself.
If Basquiat were still alive, his work would not sell for nearly this amount. Dead artists work always sell for more, and he was prolific and probably would have flooded the market like Warhol did with mass produced art. Only the collectors profit from art at this level, with a big cut for the dealers aand auction houses who create/invent the market,
This is the deal. You go to a museum and look at wall after wall of this shit and you come away with the thought that 'I saw some art today.' And then you hit the street and suddenly you're bombarded by slick, enticing advertisements and these childish scribbles recede into the background and now all you really want is a Coke, a Beemer, and CC handbag, whatever. The Masters of the Universe promote this garbage because they love making fools out of you, they love degrading you and they love selling you worthless crap ... and laundering their drug and weapon money, of course.
When did the "Trump brains" take over the comment section?
I knew JPB back when he was Samo. I can appreciate that his work is of the time and place. Yet sometimes I wonder if he was an art project of Warhol's to see what he could get the collectors, who have no idea of the time and place, to pay as much as possible for very good graffiti. There, I said, or wrote it, out loud.
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