Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child – Extra Credit

The Jean-Michel Basquiat documentary was fantastic! The film really captures Basquiat’s personality. There are clips that his friend filmed where you get to see him just being himself in a casual setting. He seemed to have a very fun-loving, chill, and innocent personality; yet he was a genius.

Basquiat was first noticed for his and a friend’s SAMO artwork on the streets. (At this point Basquiat was homeless, he had nothing.) After moving on from SAMO work, Diego Cortez helped him get entered in his first show. It was called the PS1 show, "I was just tired of seeing white walls with white people with white wine,” Cortez said. This show propelled Basquiat to the top of emerging artists.

The previous quote from Cortez highlights the third tenet of CRT, that race is a social not biological construct. Cortez recognized that the world only honored white people’s artwork as high class. He wanted to give other’s a chance. Although this show helped Basquiat immensely, his ethnicity still held the world back from recognizing him as they otherwise would have. Even when he became extremely famous. For example, some museums wouldn’t even accept his art if it was donated.

At one point, “a young graffiti artist, 25 yr old Michel Stewart, was arrested for scrawling on the wall of a subway station at three in the morning.” “He was beaten to death by five white police officers.” This news really affected Basquiat, because he knew it could have been him. “To go from being in a gallery where everyone knows you and wants to get with you, to walking down the street where everyone sees you as a bummy looking black guy.. it's a mind fogger.” To go from being treated with such high respect for his artwork, when people knew who he was, to being treated with racism when he was just an anonymous guy on the street was really hard for Basquiat. I imagine this experience would help one understand to the extreme how racist our country is.

Another example of the world’s view of Basquiat relates to Loewen. Loewen defines 'primitive' as having “only a crude understanding of the planet they live on, until aided by a forward-thinking European” (49). As America defined the Native American culture as ‘primitive,’ also an Interviewer seems to define Basquiat as such. Basquiat is not stupid though, he knows what this definition means, and humerously calls the interviewer on it, making the interviewer seem rather silly:

Interviewer: And you’re seen as some sort of primal expressionism, it that?
Basquiat: [Laughing].. Like an ape?
Interviewer: Well.. lets
Basquiat: A primate?
Interviewer: Well I don't know.. is that.. is
Basquiat: You said it, I don't know, you said it.
Iterviewer: Well, um.. y'er..

“Jean-Michel wasn't different. He was an artist just like most of the people at those scenes. But color makes you feel different. And you know people are looking at you a certain way. And all the comments you read about him had all that [primitive/primal] kind of encoded language in them, which never would have happened to a white guy.” Racism is ordinary. Famous or not, minority groups experience it on a regular basis. An example of this comes from a Newspaper clipping: “Basquiat is likened to the wild boy raised by wolves, corralled into Annina's basement and given nice clean canvases to work on instead of anonymous walls. A child of the streets gawked at...." And then again, when Basquiat is asked, "[Do] you like to be called The Black Picasso?” “Not so much,” he says, “It's flattering, but I think it is also demeaning."

At age 27 Basquiat died, leaving over 1,000 paintings and 1,000 drawings. “He is now recognized as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century and exhibits in museums all over the world.”