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Many artists and collectors in the '80s were also bored with the astringent minimalism of the prior decade. All those no-nonsense Donald Judd boxes--it was only a matter of time before a new generation came along to scribble on blank slates. That was how it felt when Basquiat's bright, hectic canvases started appearing. In Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump, an '82 picture in the Brooklyn show, he applied broad washes of pigment in a way that suggests a cross between Willem de Kooning's surfs of color and any kid's finger paintings. The boy is then built up out of a host of ragged gestures. Basquiat may not have been trained in academic drawing, but at least in his first years, he could mark a canvas in interesting ways. And in a typical Basquiat, nothing was minimal. Everything was cluttered, unbuckled and dripping. Although he came from a middle-class background--his father was an accountant--collectors tended to see him as the authentic representative of the urban underworld, the new wild child. They came running with their wallets open. They have kept them open too. Last June an untitled Basquiat from 1982, a head with fangs, sold at auction in London for $4.5 million. His record is $5.5 million, for a painting sold in 2002 by Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich. The title? Profit 1.
Mary Boone was one of the art dealers who epitomized the overheated art market of the '80s. The spike-heeled opening night, the waiting list for collectors hoping to buy from the hottest artists--it was all part of a culture of desire that she helped bring to a high pitch. Her stable of artists was diverse, but in the public's mind Boone was the woman behind big, thumping Neo-Expressionists like Schnabel. For a time she also represented Basquiat. Today she still has a thriving business at two locations in Manhattan. And as she sees it now, she did not so much create the new realities of the '80s market as respond to them. "Because of the Wall Street boom, the collector base quadrupled overnight," she says. "The art world didn't know how to deal with it."
Actually, it did, although the innovations it came up with were not always the kind that protected and developed an artist's talent. All that new money fostered a resale market, in which dealers helped collectors unload pictures they often had not held long in the first place. Paintings were "flipped" like Miami condos and traded like pork bellies--not a market designed to cultivate an artist's career over the long haul. "I try to forget the '80s as much as possible," says Robert Longo. "I was a total egomaniac, a lunatic child at that point." Early in the decade, Longo became famous for large-scale realistic drawings of business-suited men and women in lurching, heaving postures--a not-bad portrait of the young middle classes being buffeted by their times. Midway through the decade, taste changed, and a cooler brand of conceptual art came into favor. His star plummeted. "A lot of us grew up in public," he says. "In a weird way that often means you have to fail in public too. I became a poster child for the '80s." In the past few years, Longo has begun showing work again in New York Citydrawings of Sigmund Freud's apartment, waves and atom-bomb blasts. "An artist should know art history," he now concludes. "Shock value only lasts so long."