Word: basquiat
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...down with it. All the same, despite its frequent lapses into coarseness, triviality and crass merchandising--hey, because of those things!--it was the last time that stars of the gallery circuit were also famous in the wider world. The decade included not only the wild-style markings of Basquiat but also the slatherings on broken plates of Julian Schnabel, the lovable doodles of Keith Haring, the metallic metal bunny balloon of Jeff Koons--even your mother had heard about that stuff...
...that partly explained the otherwise inexplicable fame of Schnabel, whose big, slapdash canvases seemed contrived for no greater purpose than to proclaim his muscular intention to proclaim muscular intentions. The other route an artist can pursue is to borrow from readily understood sources in pop culture. That would describe Basquiat's graffiti-derived gestures and Koons' life-size renditions of Michael Jackson and the Pink Panther. Even if you don't know about Basquiat's debt to the scribble paintings of Cy Twombly or Koons' connection to Marcel Duchamp, you know what graffiti and the Pink Panther are. You have...
Many artists and collectors in the '80s were also bored with the astringent minimalism of the prior decade. All those no-nonsense Donald Judd boxes--it was only a matter of time before a new generation came along to scribble on blank slates. That was how it felt when Basquiat's bright, hectic canvases started appearing. In Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump, an '82 picture in the Brooklyn show, he applied broad washes of pigment in a way that suggests a cross between Willem de Kooning's surfs of color and any kid's finger paintings...
...hottest artists--it was all part of a culture of desire that she helped bring to a high pitch. Her stable of artists was diverse, but in the public's mind Boone was the woman behind big, thumping Neo-Expressionists like Schnabel. For a time she also represented Basquiat. Today she still has a thriving business at two locations in Manhattan. And as she sees it now, she did not so much create the new realities of the '80s market as respond to them. "Because of the Wall Street boom, the collector base quadrupled overnight," she says. "The art world...
...Schnabel began to pour more of his energies into filmmaking, which turned out to be a better place for them than painting. In 1996 he directed Basquiat, about you-know-who, with its peerlessly funny impersonation of Andy Warhol by David Bowie. Before Night Falls,made four years later, brought an Oscar nomination for Best Actor to Javier Bardem, who played Reinaldo Arenas, an AIDS-stricken Cuban writer who committed suicide in New York City in 1990. Even before Schnabel began directing, Longo directed a film, Johnny Mnemonic, starring Keanu Reeves in a futuristic film noir. So did David Salle...