EXHIBIT: "JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT"
WHERE: WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK CITY
WHAT: MORE THAN 90 PAINTINGS, DRAWINGS, CONSTRUCTIONS AND OTHER MEDIA
THE BOTTOM LINE: The show recapitulates the overhyping of a limited '80s talent.
The exhibition of the works of the late Jean-Michel Basquiat that opened at Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American Art last month is billed as a retrospective. It does cover the artist's working life: about nine years. But since it aims to present the deceased as the black Chatterton of Postmodernism -- the "marvellous boy," cut off in his prime by a drug overdose at the age of 27 -- it more resembles a parody of a funeral rite, performed over a slender talent encased in a sarcophagus grossly too large for it. There had to be room in that box for the 1980s as well.
First, the eulogy by the museum director, David Ross. "Who killed Basquiat, ask the artist's friends and foes alike," Ross writes. "Art dealers? The white world? Self-serving collectors? The excesses of the '80s?" And while we're at it, why not toss in the CIA, the military-industrial complex, or little green men -- oops, vertically challenged other-pigmented males -- from Mars? Perhaps some imitator of Oliver Stone is waiting in the wings to do just that: there are truckloads of Basquiat works in Beverly Hills. The plain truth -- that Basquiat killed Basquiat, that nobody but he was sticking the needles in his arm -- is not going to get much airing at this solemn farce of heroic victimology.
Up come the mourners: six catalog essayists, rending their garments and mangling their syntax. Their rhetoric is sublime, beyond parody. "Since slavery and oppression under white supremacy are visible subtexts in Basquiat's work," intones one, "he is as close to a Goya as American painting has ever produced." "The paintings are alive and speak for themselves," cries another, "while Jean remains wrapped in the silent purple toga of Immortality." A third, between decorative quotes from Michel Foucault, extols Basquiat's "punishing regime of self-abuse" as part of "the disciplines imposed by the principle of inverse asceticism to which he was so resolutely committed." Resolute commitment to inverse asceticism, apparently, is p.c. for addiction.
The acme of vapid pretension is reached by the former art dealer Klaus Kertess, who thinks Basquiat's drug addiction was in some large way socially therapeutic. "Heroin," Kertess opines, "seems to have played some role in the formation of the discontinuous maps of mental states that are his paintings and drawings. Heroin seems to have helped him fuse his line with his nerve endings as they responded to, parodied and sought to heal a disturbed culture."
It appears that everyone did everything to Basquiat, turning him into the all-purpose, inflatable martyr figure of recent American art. Mainly, they loaded him with more money than he knew what to do with and more praise than he could handle; the art market, like the ceiling of the Emperor Elagabalus, opened and smothered him in tons of roses. Some martyrdom.