What If?: A Comparative Study of Spectacle between Basquiat and Warhol

Leo Deng

12/7/22

Critical Theory in Art III Research Paper

Jean-Michel Basquiat was one of the many artistic geniuses of the 20th century whose life was taken too early, and he and his iconography are memorialized on a mass scale of commodity production. The pseudo-worshipping of his art images (or the spectacle of Basquiat) is omnipresent in society now, just like his contemporaries of Keith Haring and Andy Warhol, cementing his position in that 80s NYC art scene among them, that is, cementing himself as “the first black artist to conquer the white cube to become a true star.”[1] However, it is precisely the circumstances Basquiat was in and how he interacted with them that made him so memorable in the art world—that made people so divergent in opinion on him for some to “think Basquiat was a genius and others think he’s a fraud.”[2] Those circumstances were epitomized by his actions as an agent but also as a victim to outside forces in the realms of race (his political consciousness and reception from others as Black), art industry (being taken advantage of), and one person of glaring importance in his career: Warhol. Looking back, the question always emerges: what if he stayed alive? Not as a serious “what if?” to consider but rather as a strongly rhetorical one to forcibly recognize the artistic output we can look at today that was abruptly cut off in the elementary stages of a potentially lifelong career—one that could and must have extrapolated in how his artwork reflected his circumstances. Through a lens of theories of the Spectacle, Basquiat’s artistic position is epitomized as a cannibalized subject through his relationship with Warhol, the differences of reproducibility and semiotics in their respective work, and their contradictory socio-cultural determinations.

The Spectacle and NYC

From Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, the spectacle is defined as “capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image.”[3]Simply, a spectacle is a worshipped “image” or representation that is presented or disseminated in a way to reinforce the status quo of capitalism. It’s essentially all the seductive images we call “mass media” that numb us into passivity, allowing us to give in to the inherent laws of the circulation of capital, that is, we follow, idolize, and worship these images that we believe we want (but are also designed for us to want them), are then dictated by them, which are all predicated on the purely profit-driven laws of consumer capitalism. These images “can be found on every screen that you look at. It is the advertisements plastered on the subway and the pop-up ads that appear in your browser. It is the listicle telling you ‘10 things you need to know about ‘x.’’ The spectacle reduces reality to an endless supply of commodifiable fragments, while encouraging us to focus on appearances.”[4] An important part of the spectacle is that it not only quells subjects into a state of passive pleasure, but it makes sure they are unaware of it.

The NYC art scene Basquiat was a part of was a spectacle itself, employing the examples of celebrity, commodity as spectacle, and combining elements of both into a single spectacular image. The commodity is the ultimate reflection of an economy, which is always in a dialectical relationship with sociocultural norms,[5] in the labored product that is the representation of the ruthless march of capital and its status quo.[6] Whereas commodity as spectacle is fittingly forced into the objectified product, the celebrity is a human being objectified in the same manner; they are “the object of identification with the shallow seeming life that has to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations which are actually lived.”[7] Thus, the celebrity functions much like a commodity, a mere product to be packaged, presented, and sold. We easily see these ideas omnipresent in the NYC art scene, especially when thinking about the atmosphere and precedence Warhol set before Basquiat—an atmosphere of “stardom, the way he combined art, party, and his persona into an instantly recognizable brand.”[8]

The NYC art scene was an object, an image that many idolized and worshipped; especially in the sense of celebrity and the popularity of their artwork, both their person and literal images became commodities. I’m not saying that this art scene was purely a façade for the purpose of idolization—as it definitely was predicated on a real-world of creative expression as “the golden age of the art world, the art star. The ‘80s, from 1980 on, is such a flashpoint,” said artist Lee Quiñones in the new Netflix documentary The Andy Warhol Diaries.[9]What I am saying about the art scene is that it had all the qualities to make it a spectacle, or fall victim to the wider context of the economy that it had no control over. In terms of Basquiat, these forces would manifest as the art dealers’ industry-driven actions, the art economy’s immediate (fetishistic and non-fetishistic) glamorization of his work, and the consumer industry’s memorialization of the artist. All the inner workings of these forces are precisely at the epicenter of Basquiat’s cannibalization.

Basquiat and Warhol

Jean-Michel’s rise can be attributed to many events and acts as his diverse range of artistic talents were constantly being practiced by him before being famous. From an MTV cameo as a DJ to playing the clarinet at Gray at Hurrah’s with Michael Holman and Shannon Dawson to his SAMO© graffiti with Al Diaz, these talents contributed to the genius artist Basquiat was about to become.[10] SAMO© was a big aspect of his initial memorability being seen everywhere around the city, as graffiti was also a huge way for artists of color to literally put a splash of color in a prior art world of “white wine, white walls, and just white people,” said graffiti artist Fab 5 Freddy who is known for recreating Warhol’s soup cans with Quiñones in graffiti on the side of a subway train.[11] With this background at the helm, combined with being “immediately singled out by the critics as a promising talent” after his first Times Square Show exhibition in 1980, he was propelled into stardom, being passed from gallery to gallery until meeting Warhol.[12]

Basquiat’s meteoric rise in the art world was met by Warhol's immediate fascination with him, where a strong, intimate relationship of difference and respect would be built between the two. One of Warhol’s instinctual reactions to Basquiat’s paintings at a Los Angeles show was, “Jean-Michel’s work is wonderful. It’s so exciting. And I think he will last.”[13] In his diaries, Warhol acknowledges that he interacted with and remembered Basquiat, before his fame and formal meetup arranged by art dealer Bruno Bischofberger, as that kid “who used the name SAMO, and when he used to sit on the sidewalk of Greenwich Village and paint T-shirts, I’d give him ten dollars here and there.”[14] Soon, they were seen as social partners on interviews and parties with extreme physical comfort with each other getting their nails done and taking silly photos—it was a genuine bond not dependent on any selfish need for one to materially benefit from the other’s art practice.[15] However, there were more qualitative, opportunistic reasons they admired each other so much. Since Warhol already had his peak stardom before Basquiat came around, Warhol was cemented as an artistic legend—someone who mastered their specific method of pop art. Basquiat idolized Warhol’s artistic mastermind and absolute control in not only his artistic aesthetic but also the mass perception his work received. On the other hand, Warhol had extreme favoritism towards Basquiat, which is apparent in his diaries and further commentary from other artists and critics in the Netflix documentary; this was because Warhol’s career felt like it was coming toward an end while Basquiat’s work felt so revolutionary and refreshing—it was a true mixture of envy and genuine appreciation.[16]

Basquiat vs. Warhol: Semiotics, Socio-Cultural Backgrounds, and Reproducibility

The two artists’ respective idolization of each other paints the backdrop for the precise differences in their socio-cultural backgrounds, which is reflected in the very semiotics and aesthetic of their art, determining their drastically different interactions and relationships with the spectacle. Their semiotics and aesthetic in art practice are apparently distinct from one another, but they both used their semiotics to pedestalize their subjects of choice; what and how they pedestalized subjects exactly exhibited their relationship to the spectacle. For Basquiat, he put Black athletes, musicians, and politicians at the forefront of his work; he did this through abstract representations of anyone from Hank Aaron to Charlie Parker to Malcolm X, brought together by the motif of a crown as if to deem these figures with “royal” significance—figures that deserved more respect from an innately racist white world he lived in.[17] In contrast, Warhol placed globally iconic people and everyday commodities on the pedestal that was his art under the label of pop culture; from Marilyn Monroe to Campbell Soup to Mao Zedong, he reproduced (iteratively) iconic figures seemingly for a fascination of iconography itself, as it may suggest from his short responses in interviews and seemingly arbitrary choice of icons, just that they were iconic. There was something utterly uncontroversial or apolitical about his work, perhaps the iterative fashion of his screen printing, that seemed simultaneously controversial in the choices of what he chose to print.[18] No one knew if he was critiquing the commodity, embracing it, or exploiting it; cultural reaction seems to cement only the fact that his work will forever be a mysterious contradiction that embody the beginnings of consumer culture and mass media[19]—a mirror image of such a society, if you will.[20] Basquiat’s direction was completely different; his use of linguistic manipulation by crossing out words to emphasize them, making labels, and writing formulae were all part of an effort in the storytelling of Blackness and the Black experience in America. Basquiat said, “I use the ‘black’ as the protagonist because I am black, and that’s why I use it as the main character in all the paintings.”[21] His paintings were clearly anti-establishment, anti-state, and anti-capitalist in many ways, using his techniques to literally “counter-spectaclize” Mona Lisa (in Mona Lisa, 1983) by making her features scratchy yet recognizable and critiquing the abstraction of commodities that is the money form on the bill she is placed on. In other works, he shows his political awareness of the unproductive garrulousness of the political “progressives” of America in Obnoxious Liberals (1982), critiques neocolonialist and imperialist extraction in Untitled (1983),[22] and the blatant commentary on segregation in Jim Crow (1986).

Figure 1 - Mona Lisa, 1983

Figure Figure 2 - Untitled, 1983

Thus, Basquiat and Warhol had very different approaches to the content in their art, highly influenced by their socio-cultural backgrounds, with Basquiat necessarily critiquing and making sense of the oppressive structure surrounding him as an African American, while Warhol embraced the spectacles and commodities of society in an all-encompassing way.

Basquiat grew up in an upper-middle-class background where his father provided him financial support to go to private school until he lost money, then Basquiat “had to be bussed up to a public school where there was a lot of Italians. And the boys there used to beat him up.”[23] His experience with racism, particularly from the white world of course, only increased exponentially from there on out, coinciding with his need for financial independence while pursuing art professionally. Critic Greg Tate has notably said that he cannot discuss Basquiat’s art “without going ballistic on white people,” showing the artist’s inextricable ties with the “cornerstones of the American empire, racism and class struggle.”[24] In contrast, Warhol grew up in a lower working-class household in Pittsburgh where his parents did everything in their power to make sure he went to college.[25] Thus, he knew the struggles of growing up poor and set his eyes on succeeding, albeit, in the capitalist fashion he did so.[26] His journey to becoming a famous artist was not as arduous because he prioritized financial stability, first working a commercial design job (which he majored in at university) for years before devoting himself to art. Even then, his capitalist tendencies and perspectives appeared but were nuanced; the invention of the Factory is a clear example. The four-story New York studio decorated with tin foil and silver paint saw many artists, musicians, and celebrities in the party stardom Warhol is known for, but there was also a multitude of artist-workers employed in an industrialized fashion to reproduce his work.[27] Lastly, Warhol was also gay but little is written about it in terms of personal struggle and more about the inclusion in the bigger picture AIDS crisis, contradicting his Catholic faith, and being an LGBT pop icon. Basquiat’s sexuality is more ambiguous with Kenny Scharf saying, “he had a lot of girlfriends, but he also liked guys, and they just don’t wanna talk about that,”[28] and Warhol writing about going to a gay bar, “but Jean-Michel wouldn’t go. He told me in the old days, when he didn’t have any money, he would hustle and get ten dollars. And he didn’t want to remember that.”[29] That adds an extra layer of hardship to Basquiat’s system of reality[30] with the intersectionality that nuances his experience of discrimination, as well (Futuradosmil elaborates on the homophobia specific in black communities in this documentary, too).

These socio-cultural differences between Basquiat and Warhol culminate in their differing relationships with reproducibility—a seminal part of the spectacle. Warhol’s Factory was the very epitome of his relationship to reproducibility: he had full control over it. The very concept of creating a “Factory” for art simultaneously mocked the industrial label and took on its form through owning all the means of production that his worker-artists used to produce for him, like a capitalist. A famous extreme example that supports the exploitative measures Warhol employed was Valerie Solanas; she was a revolutionary feminist that wrote the SCUM Manifesto and shot Warhol in 1968 after being pushed to the edge by Warhol not giving her spotlight as an artist, which was a mission of the Factory, and being used to reproduce his work with bare compensation.[31] Nevertheless, Warhol took advantage of his mastermind position, being able to see externally the spectacle that was the “Warhol brand” and thus, control his creative output, its scarcity in production, and its value and demand in dissemination—his very existence is the artwork itself: the direly conflicting embodiment of the clash but unity of critique and utilization of consumerism

Basquiat’s relationship was completely distinct precisely because of his socio-cultural circumstances as a Black man in America. In comparing his work to white artist Jean Dubuffet, Debuffet’s politics “needed a lecture to show, needed a separate text, whereas in Jean-Michel they are integrated by the picture’s necessity.”[32] As I’ve already argued, Basquiat’s work is clearly political, but here we see it as not only intentional choice and commentary but a necessity as one’s experience in America as Black cannot be helped but structured by their oppression. In many ways, he was viewed as a dandy who was similarly quiet and gave short responses in interviews as Warhol and could churn out masterpieces like this avant-garde genius.[33] This is supported, or at least the fact that he was an independent artist critiquing society and the spectacle (rather than Warhol’s embrace of it), by his clear political acuteness in his art, which ironically makes it impossible for him to attain what he idolized about Warhol so much—a full mastery of aesthetic and mass perception that was only attainable for Warhol by capitalist methods, completely contradicting Basquiat’s methods. His experience with oppression mixed with his being the first Black artist to conquer the white art world made him a particularly vulnerable subject to the cannibalistic nature of the spectacle of NYC’s art scene. From his early interactions with the gallery scenes like with Anina Nosei seemed suspicious to other black artists; Fab 5 Freddy said, “A black kid painting in the basement. It’s not good man.”[34] Basquiat did reject this outlook, though, saying, “Oh Christ, if I was white, they would just say artist-in-residence;”[35] regardless of what he thought, the position he was in was of suspicious action by Nosei to benefit extremely off his desperation for a place to work, making it feel like a fetishistic and exhibitionist industrialization of Basquiat. “Because he was black, he attracted certain stereotypes, so talk was about his upbringing in the ghettos, or he was labeled a graffiti artist” despite rejecting both.[36] Conceptual artist Glenn Ligon said on the 80s push for artistic superstars, “but in terms of black superstars, there could only be one at a time. And Basquiat was the one. He was the anointed one.”[37] He was also infamously described as a “primal expressionist” in an interview where he would laughingly respond, like “a primate?”[38] “Too many would describe Jean in racist terms. That ignorance… They just couldn’t believe that a young black man, 23, 24, 25, could be accomplishing these things,” said Freddy.[39]

Basquiat’s position had two sides: the genius or the fraud—the white world’s fetishism of his Black artistry or their explicit racism towards it. This reveals particularly the White Society of the Spectacle that contextualized Basquiat’s world: a country built on the history of exploiting and subordinating Black people and upholding the ideology of White supremacy. Professors Hesse and Sayyid formulate Guy Debord’s broader idea of a society ‘colonized’ by the Spectacle precisely in terms of America’s White supremacy, appearing in times of civil unrest like the recent Black Lives Matters protests in 2020. The White Society of the Spectacle “threatens all of us with the militarization of Whiteness through policing, without even the façade of waiting for consent, and the resurgence of street fighting White nationalists who feel their sovereignty tumbling down, highlighting the questioning of Whiteness all around them.”[40] Therefore, America is not just a society of the spectacle but a White Society of the Spectacle that is challenged by historical ruptures that confront white supremacy. So, for Basquiat, in the clearly White Spectacle of NYC’s art world was the rupture that aroused the very tension in the “genius or fraud” view of him, predicated on his Blackness. Like how the white nationalists embody the petty defense of their oppressive sovereignty, the conservative art critics similarly attempted to delegitimize Basquiat: “The art world, which is full of liberal left-wing types, was feeling they needed to make a bow in that direction, this disadvantaged minorities, and so on. His [Basquiat’s] contribution to art is so minuscule, as to be practically nil,” said racist critic Hilton Kramer.[41] Basquiat was thus constantly attacked by racism and exploitative intentions in the art world and unfortunately, the heavy drug (heroin) use common to the 80s art scene, but particularly to the personal struggles of Basquiat, that fueled his art practice[42] took his life prematurely at the age of 27—months after Warhol’s death from surgery complications. His last years were filled with the paranoia and emotional volatility of a cannibalized subject: “You never know what kind of mood he’ll be in. What he’ll be on. He gets really paranoid and says, ‘you’re just using me. You’re just using me.’ And then he’ll get guilty for being paranoid,” wrote Warhol.[43] Sadly, “when all these dealers heard that there was a really talented Black artist, who would probably die off soon from drugs, that they hurried to buy his things.”[44]

Ultimately, thinking about what Basquiat could’ve done if not for his heroin overdose gives a sense of remorseful wonder, especially in terms of his political commentary. Legendary feminist critic bell hooks summarizes him best: “The ‘ugliness’ conveyed in Basquiat’s paintings is not solely the horror of colonizing whiteness. […] The images are nakedly violent. They speak of dread, of terror, of being torn apart, ravished. Commodified, appropriated, made to ‘serve’ the interests of white masters, the black body as Basquiat shows it is incomplete, not fulfilled, never a full image.”[45] Sadly, Basquiat’s commemoration through consumerism’s reduction of his art to countless commodities today only epitomizes the cannibalization the NYC Art Spectacle subjected him to. However, the very real, material rupture he was able to make sets a precedent for the continued class and racial struggle against America’s White Society of the Spectacle and its hold on the art world. May Jean-Michel Basquiat rest in power.

Appendix

Figure 1: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/49891508342087262/

Figure 2: https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/UNTITLED/FBC1C62E6C4361F2

Bibliography

Bockris, Victor. The Life and Death of Andy Warhol. New York : Bantam Books, 1989. http://archive.org/details/lifedeathofandyw00bock.

Culver, Natalee. “Andy Warhol and His Obsession with Consumer Culture.” Sutori, March 13, 2019. https://www.sutori.com/en/story/andy-warhol-and-his-obsession-with-consumer-culture--bJeWXVmeqmKWZcZMfHMXNTsX.

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Black & Red, 1967. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm.

Hesse, Barnor, and S. Sayyid. “Black Lives Matter and The White Society of the Spectacle : Northern Notes,” July 15, 2020. https://northernnotes.leeds.ac.uk/black-lives-matter-and-the-white-society-of-the-spectacle/.

Holzwarth, Hans Werner, ed. Jean-Michel Basquiat. 40th Ed. TASCHEN, 2020.

Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm.

Nairne, Eleanor. “The Art of Storytelling.” In Jean-Michel Basquiat. 40th Ed., edited by Hans Werner Holzwarth. TASCHEN, 2020.

Purje, Lauren, and Tiernan Morgan. “An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord’s ‘The Society of the Spectacle.’” Hyperallergic, August 10, 2016. http://hyperallergic.com/313435/an-illustrated-guide-to-guy-debords-the-society-of-the-spectacle/.

Ragona, Cash. “Class on Kitsch, Pop, Camp 1960-69.” Carnegie Mellon University, College of Fine Arts, September 14, 2022.

Tate, Greg. “Black Like B.” In Basquiat’s Defacement: The Untold Story. New York: Guggenheim Museum, with ARTBOOK | D.A.P., 2019.

The Andy Warhol Diaries E4 Collab: Andy & Basquiat. TV Documentary. Netflix, 2022. https://www.netflix.com/watch/81133392?trackId=255875003&tctx=0%2C0%2CNAPA%40%40%7Ceb724ac2-4401-4a67-bf53-18870b3f16c9-79950686_titles%2F2%2F%2F%2F1%2F60023207%2CNAPA%40%40%7Ceb724ac2-4401-4a67-bf53-18870b3f16c9-79950686_titles%2F2%2F%2F%2F1%2F60023207%2Cunknown%2C%2Ceb724ac2-4401-4a67-bf53-18870b3f16c9-79950686%7C1%2CsuggestionTitlesResults%2C81026142.

“The Factory.” In Wikipedia, November 16, 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Factory&oldid=1122215524.

[1] Hans Werner Holzwarth, ed., Jean-Michel Basquiat. 40th Ed. (TASCHEN, 2020), 18. [2] Greg Tate, “Black Like B.,” in Basquiat’s Defacement: The Untold Story (New York: Guggenheim Museum, with ARTBOOK | D.A.P., 2019), 90. [3] Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Black & Red, 1967), https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm, 34. [4] Lauren Purje and Tiernan Morgan, “An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord’s ‘The Society of the Spectacle,’” Hyperallergic, August 10, 2016, http://hyperallergic.com/313435/an-illustrated-guide-to-guy-debords-the-society-of-the-spectacle/. [5] I assert the dialectical relationship through the Marxist concept of base and superstructure from Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm. [6] Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 40. “This incessant expansion of economic power in the form of the commodity, which transformed human labor into commodity-labor, into wage-labor, cumulatively led to an abundance in which the primary question of survival is undoubtedly resolved, but in such a way that it is constantly rediscovered; it is continually posed again each time at a higher level. [...] The economy transforms the world, but transforms it only into a world of economy.” [7] Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 60. This is the continuation of the passage quoted: “Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living and viewing society unfettered, free to express themselves globally. They embody the inaccessible result of social labor by dramatizing its by-products magically projected above it as its goal: power and vacations, decision and consumption, which are the beginning and end of an undiscussed process.” [8] Holzwarth, Jean-Michel Basquiat. 40th Ed, 12. [9]The Andy Warhol Diaries E4 Collab: Andy & Basquiat, TV Documentary (Netflix, 2022), https://www.netflix.com/watch/81133392?trackId=255875003&tctx=0%2C0%2CNAPA%40%40%7Ceb724ac2-4401-4a67-bf53-18870b3f16c9-79950686_titles%2F2%2F%2F%2F1%2F60023207%2CNAPA%40%40%7Ceb724ac2-4401-4a67-bf53-18870b3f16c9-79950686_titles%2F2%2F%2F%2F1%2F60023207%2Cunknown%2C%2Ceb724ac2-4401-4a67-bf53-18870b3f16c9-79950686%7C1%2CsuggestionTitlesResults%2C81026142. [10] Holzwarth, Jean-Michel Basquiat. 40th Ed, 12-17. [11]The Andy Warhol Diaries E4 Collab: Andy & Basquiat, 5:08. [12] Holzwarth, Jean-Michel Basquiat. 40th Ed, 17. [13]The Andy Warhol Diaries E4 Collab: Andy & Basquiat, 13:00. My italics – L. D. [14]The Andy Warhol Diaries E4 Collab: Andy & Basquiat, 14:20 [15]The Andy Warhol Diaries E4 Collab: Andy & Basquiat, 20:25. Described by Fab 5 Freddy and Greg Tate. [16] Cash Ragona, “Class on Kitsch, Pop, Camp 1960-69” (Carnegie Mellon University, College of Fine Arts, September 14, 2022). Selections of the Netflix documentary were also shown in this lecture. [17] Despite being a famous artist, racism still breached Basquiat’s everyday experiences as “his blackness means that taxis won’t stop for him (‘black taxi drivers drive past me too,” he [Basquiat] stresses).” Holzwarth, Jean-Michel Basquiat. 40th Ed, 18. [18] Ragona, “Class on Kitsch, Pop, Camp 1960-69.” [19] E.g., some people will say that Warhol’s emphasis on pop culture made it more inclusive for everyone to consume like in Natalee Culver, “Andy Warhol and His Obsession with Consumer Culture,” Sutori, March 13, 2019, https://www.sutori.com/en/story/andy-warhol-and-his-obsession-with-consumer-culture--bJeWXVmeqmKWZcZMfHMXNTsX. However, from clear interaction with the art economy and valuing his art purely in high monetary values shown in the documentary and his diaries, he was never fully divorced from an elitist, high-brow art world. The Andy Warhol Diaries E4 Collab: Andy & Basquiat. [20] “Guy Debord once suggested that the commodification of Western societies has produced a sectoral consumerist vision that operated as if it were a mirror of the whole society; he called this vision-mirror ‘the Spectacle.’” Barnor Hesse and S. Sayyid, “Black Lives Matter and The White Society of the Spectacle : Northern Notes,” July 15, 2020, https://northernnotes.leeds.ac.uk/black-lives-matter-and-the-white-society-of-the-spectacle/. [21] Holzwarth, Jean-Michel Basquiat. 40th Ed, 22. [22] His use of the word “SUGAR” in many paintings refers “to the British use of indentured labor in sugar cultivation in colonial territories, even after the abolition of slavery.” Eleanor Nairne, “The Art of Storytelling,” in Jean-Michel Basquiat. 40th Ed., ed. Hans Werner Holzwarth (TASCHEN, 2020), 72. [23]The Andy Warhol Diaries E4 Collab: Andy & Basquiat, 15:50. [24] Tate, “Black Like B,” 90. [25] Victor Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol (New York : Bantam Books, 1989), http://archive.org/details/lifedeathofandyw00bock. [26] This is not surprising in my opinion as many psychologists, sociologists, and theorists have discussed this phenomenon of “hyper-capitalism” that you see in oppressed groups like Black people and immigrants in America. They see climbing the capitalist structure as not only just the only way to succeed, but to spite the white elites that they can overpower them in their own system. I notably recall this phenomenon formulated in George Lipsitz’s Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place on the hyper-capitalism of Black rap artists. [27] “The Factory,” in Wikipedia, November 16, 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Factory&oldid=1122215524. [28]The Andy Warhol Diaries E4 Collab: Andy & Basquiat, 24:36. [29]The Andy Warhol Diaries E4 Collab: Andy & Basquiat, 24:55. [30] I am referring to James Baldwin’s usage here. [31] Ragona, “Class on Kitsch, Pop, Camp 1960-69.” [32] Holzwarth, Jean-Michel Basquiat. 40th Ed, 100. [33] Ragona, “Class on Kitsch, Pop, Camp 1960-69.” Some paintings took under two hours to make, like his portrait with Warhol that is considered one of “the great masterpieces of contemporary art” according to art dealer Jeffrey Deitch. The Andy Warhol Diaries E4 Collab: Andy & Basquiat, 16:37. [34] Nairne, “The Art of Storytelling,” 57. [35] Nairne, “The Art of Storytelling,” 57. [36] Holzwarth, Jean-Michel Basquiat. 40th Ed, 17. [37]The Andy Warhol Diaries E4 Collab: Andy & Basquiat, 56:46. [38]The Andy Warhol Diaries E4 Collab: Andy & Basquiat, 57:34. [39]The Andy Warhol Diaries E4 Collab: Andy & Basquiat, 57:46. [40] Hesse and Sayyid, “Black Lives Matter and The White Society of the Spectacle : Northern Notes.” [41]The Andy Warhol Diaries E4 Collab: Andy & Basquiat, 57:58. [42] “I [Basquiat] made the best paintings ever. I was completely reclusive, worked a lot, took a lot of drugs.” Nairne, “The Art of Storytelling,” 63. Paige Powell (one of Basquiat’s partners): “Everyone was doing a lot of drugs back then. I just wouldn’t tolerate the drugs. And he knew it, so he’d create situations, […] but then he would never come back.” The Andy Warhol Diaries E4 Collab: Andy & Basquiat, 55:15. [43]The Andy Warhol Diaries E4 Collab: Andy & Basquiat, 1:00:20. [44]The Andy Warhol Diaries E4 Collab: Andy & Basquiat, 1:04:46. [45] Holzwarth, Jean-Michel Basquiat. 40th Ed, 24. Quoting bell hooks from “Altars of Sacrifice: Re-Membering Basquiat,” Art in America, 1993.