Word: basquiat
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Dates: during 1985-1985
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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...