America consumes its celebrities. We gorge on their beauty, their wealth, their ubiquity and the magnified scope of their missteps. Every era of the twentieth century has provided our society with a body of new faces and figures upon which we, in our hunger for escape, can feast until exhaustion.
In the 1920s, the key celebrities of choice were literary: we dined on Fitzgerald and Hemingway — seeing in their alcohol-fueled genius some validation of our nation’s excesses. In the mid-century, our hunger turned to movies and music: The supernovas of the moment — Garland, Davis, Monroe; Joplin, Hendrix and Morrison — nourished the latent American narcissism that would carry us through the Cold War and into the cultural void of the 70s.
In the 1980s, the art world seized center stage: Warhol, Reed and Bowie became the triumvirate kings of our voyeurism; their brilliance helped illuminate the icons of the age. In hindsight, few of the anointed warranted the credence they were given: Niko was little more than a fleeting novelty; Ziggy persevered only in the realm of musical fantasy. Basquiat, however — Jean-Michel Basquiat — was something else entirely.
Basquiat’s fame exemplified America’s morbid fascination with the “Other.” His rise to prominence — meteoric, irresistible, bewildering — was an anthropology of racial fetishism cloaked in the guise of anti-bourgeois aesthetics. The fame and fortune he accumulated in those few short years stand as a testament to our unending fascination with the culture of the street, and our national need to romanticize the self-destructive tendencies of the creative “genius.” More locally, it spoke to New York’s voyeuristic awe of any and everything “Downtown” — the sex, the glamour, the excess, and perhaps most critically, the exclusivity.
Basquiat’s life as an artist both validated and deconstructed this paradigm of art-world triumphant. His conquest of its center was a victory for every unschooled artist toiling in the shadows of the downtown art scene. And for every artistically inclined black person exposed to his celebrity, his successes were beyond victorious — they were messianic.
Brooklyn-born and raised, half-Haitian and half-Puerto Rican, Basquiat entered the art-world’s consciousness through the cellar. Among the most inventive of an “elite” team of graffiti artists that claimed lower Manhattan’s most visible public spaces as its canvas, SAMO© (as in “same old shit”) — Basquait’s nom de plume — very quickly became a ubiquitous sight along the byways of the then-burgeoning Soho art scene. Bypassing the conventional self-naming that often characterizes urban graffiti, SAMO© offered scathing, provocative and often cryptic phrases to his audience — most of which were intended to disturb the complacency of cultured New Yorkers. (The very same individuals who were the gatekeepers of “official” cultural significance.)
In transforming those spaces shared by the ordinary and extraordinary into a canvas of cultural criticism and free expression (literally and figuratively), Basquiat demonstrated the capacity of those outside of power (he lived as a homeless person for much of his early adulthood), to quite literally move power — and in some respects even redefine it. The fact that he bore no physical resemblance to the art world’s chosen lights, or its “beautiful people,” only further emphasizes the point.
In time, the glare of Olympus proved too great a burden, and Basquiat — wealthy, famous and celebrated beyond reckoning — succumbed to the drug habits that had weakened his productivity and destroyed his gifts. And in the bitter irony that often attaches to those stars whose lights go dim too soon (Basquiat was 27 when he overdosed), his life become truly significant — his vision and his work were truly celebrated — only after his death.
This editorial originally appeared in an NYU student publication.
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