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The malignant Other -- racial, cultural, critical, you name it -- bulks so large in this hagiographic exercise that one is surprised to find that the catalog nowhere mentions the one thing that Others did do for Basquiat in the last couple of years of his life: namely, get his pictures going when he was too zonked to do so himself. This operation was performed during the final six months by an artist named Rick Prol, at $15 an hour. Of course, artists have long used studio assistants. But under the circumstances, it seems hypocritical to gush about Basquiat's last works in terms of the uniqueness of his hand, its emotional urgency and so forth.
This show provides plenty of evidence of Basquiat's graphic industry, but not much that he ever tried to deal with the real world through drawing. He had no idea how to discipline himself into making a creative accord between its forms and the marks on paper or canvas. He just scribbled and jotted, picking up stylistic pointers from older artists he admired, among them Cy Twombly and Jean Dubuffet. He could only rehearse his own stereotypes, his pictorial nouns for "head" or "body," over and over again.
Consequently, although Basquiat's images look quite vivid and sharp when one first sees them, and though from time to time he could produce an intriguing passage of spiky marks or a brisk clash of blaring color, the work quickly settles into the visual monotony of arid overstylization. Its relentless fortissimo is wearisome. (An exception is some of the works on paper, which attain a delicacy of placement and interval absent from the paintings.)
Much is made of Basquiat's use of sources -- vagrant code-symbols, quotes from Leonardo or African bushman art or Egyptian murals. But these are so scattered, so lacking in plastic force or conceptual interest, that they seem merely the result of browsing and doodling rather than looking -- homeless representation. For polemical purposes, any rough sketch of a cartoon African carrying a crate next to a white with a topee and a gun can be turned into a "devastating" indictment of colonialism -- but this doesn't make Basquiat into an artist with an articulate social vision. As for his poetic effusions and snatches of writing, they are mostly fey blither.
The life was so sad and truncated, and the art that came out of it so limited, that it seems unfair to dwell on either. Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? Basquiat had talent -- more than some of the young painters who were his contemporaries, though this may not be saying much. The trouble was that it did not develop; it was frozen by celebrity, like a deer in a jacklight beam. In the '80s Basquiat was made a cult figure by a money-glutted, corrupt and wholly promotional art-marketing system. He died in 1988, a year before the bull market collapsed and took his prices down with it. Now the same system, bruised but essentially unchanged, is trying to revalidate those prices in hard times by strumming on the theme that Victimhood Is Powerful. What has descended on Basquiat is not the "silent purple toga of Immortality" -- it's the loud purple haze of hype, all over again.