Status Updates From Basquiat: A Quick Killing i...

lmao. seriously though it’s really good and super fascinating, didn’t realize just his involved with the club and punk scenes he was which maybe sounds silly now that i say it but truly a visionary / pioneer even from the start

"I told him, you can either be a great artist or a great tragedy. He smiled, and said, why can't I be both?"

"At twenty, Basquiat, the eternal child, did not have a driver's license, a Social Security's number, or any credit cards. But he already had an attitude, and his outrageous looks and equally outrageous behavior caused international havoc."

"I think the two similarities that Jean and graffiti in general had in common was that people wanted to harness a wild animal. They couldn't control him, and they couldn't control graffiti. The art world was bland and they wanted something on their walls. Jean-Michel's work is very anti-art-world, you know. It's almost like a curse. And people still love that. They love being cursed at."

"Basquiat's life and death tread that peculiarly American line where tabloid meets tragedy. Precisely what energized his art made it impossible for him to survive the system (...) We live in a culture that constantly cannibalizes itself"

"In Basquiat's paintings, boys never become men, they become skeletons and skulls. Presence is expressed as absence - wether it's in the spectral bodies and disembodied skulls he paints or the words he crosses out. Basquiat is obsessed with deconstructing the images and language of his fragmented world. His work is the ultimate expression of a profound sense of "no there there", a deep hole in the soul."