Lara’s Reviews > Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art – The Biography of a Painter's Meteoric Rise from Downtown Graffiti to International Fame > Status Update

"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."

"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."