Word: basquiat
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...pull the rest. A week earlier, Sotheby's contemporary auction was a flop, with overall sales totaling little more than $55 million against estimates of about $86 million to more than $112 million. The prices of "name" artists, from Willem de Kooning to Eric Fischl and Jean-Michel Basquiat, were humiliatingly trounced, although a few -- Cy Twombly, Richard Diebenkorn -- saw new levels set for their work...
...gone. His energy last flickered in the hieratic images of Mao Tse-tung (1973) and perhaps in the 1976 paintings of hammers and sickles. The rest was mostly social portraiture, liquor endorsements and bathetic collaborations with junior burnouts like Jean-Michel Basquiat, along with one single-theme edition of prints after another. But even in decline, Warhol remained indicative...
There are many careers of this sort. Among their prototypes is the former subway artist and present disco decorator Keith Haring, 27, with his thin doodles of barking dogs and radioactive babies. Another is Jean-Michel Basquiat, 24, much hyped as a sort of art-world Eddie Murphy and hence especially popular with Los Angeles collectors, his untutored and zappy scrawls routinely praised for their "energy." (This anxious hope for signs of energy is a sure index of cultural flabbiness.) But for postgraffiti art the writing is already on the wall, and such careers, rolling in their limos to oblivion...
...Jackson Pollock. Its expectations have been buoyed by 20 years of self- fulfilling gush about art investment. It would like live heroes as well. But it wants them to be like heroes on TV, fetishized, plentiful and acquiescent. If Pollock was John Wayne, the likes of Haring 'n' Basquiat resemble those two what's-their-names on Miami Vice: cute cops, a designer avant-garde whose "newness" has all the significance of a goat-cheese pizza...