Word: basquiat
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...back of the jacket cover boasts a quote from Chuck Close, the well known contemporary painter: "Hoban's book is not just the story of Jean-Michel Basquiat but an insightful and devastating portrait of the 1980s art world, its movers and shakers, as well as Basquiat's manipulators, hangers-on, and a precious few genuine friends." Perhaps if this book had been "just the story of Jean-Michel Basquiat" it would have been a more successful biography. This quote, like the biography itself, implies that "Basquiat's manipulators," et al. are, for some reason, more significant or compelling than...
...unclear who these few genuine friends are that Close speaks of. The biography is riddled with quotes from people who claim to have been Basquiat's friends, yet speak of him as some sort of exotic wild child. Hoban slips into this mode, as well. It seems as if Basquiat's hair (he had dreds during his most famous years) or penis size (puportedly large) is mentioned every other page. While Hoban recognizes the racism evident in a few specific encounters, she never gives any sort of profound analysis of the racism that structured Basquiat's most significant relationships, both...
Perhaps the only person quoted that sounds like a genuine friend of Basquiat's is Jeffrey Wright, a man who never even met him. Wright, the actor who played Basquiat in Schnabel's movie, criticizes Schnabel's directing, saying, "Julian made him out as too docile and too much a victim and too passive and not as dangerous as he really was. It's about containing Basquiat. It's about aggrandizing himself through Basquiat's memory. It's really fucking barbaric. But maybe our culture can't take the real danger of Basquiat right...
Even through Hoban's bizarre, vulgar-Freudian analysis of Basquiat's artistic ambition as a misplaced search for his father's approval, the meaning of Wright's quote is clear. The danger that Wright refers to is not the danger that Hoban depicts through stories of Basquiat's drug-induced tantrums and unprofessionalism. The danger that Wright speaks of is embodied more in Basquiat's work than in his own damaged body. Hoban lacks the critical eye or artistic sophistication necessary to do any close reading of Basquiat's work. Often, when the opportunity presents itself, because a piece...
...danger that Wright sees in Basquiat is the danger that is missing in Hoban's portrayal. Basquiat's work approaches the underbelly of capitalistic American cultural values with the perspicaciousness that Derrida brings to the deconstruction of logocentric thought. (The two are often discussed together, since 'erasure' is a recurring theme of Basquiat's work.) His work is to American culture what post-structuralism is to Western philosophy: an intelligent threat from the inside out. By repeatedly glossing over Basquiat's work, and focusing instead on trashy melodramas of the art world, Hoban flattens the complexities of Basquita's short...