Lecture 002

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Basquiat's Defacement : the untold story / Chaédria LaBouvier.

Graffiti Artists: defacement ("It could have been me")

• tag culture: black majority, was not considered art

Jean-Michel Basquiat painted 'Defacement' (The Death of Michael Stewart) in 1983 to commemorate the death of a young, black artist who died from injuries sustained while in police custody after being arrested for allegedly tagging a New York City subway station. Published to accompany a focused exhibition of Basquiat's response to anti-black racism and police brutality, this catalogue explores a chapter in the artist's career through both the lens of his identity and the Lower East Side as a nexus of activism in the early 1980s.

• SAMO: the same old crap," then shortening the phrase to "Same Old"

• Defacement

  • Mickle Sturore: artist, dated the same girl friend as Basquiat, died, in Basquiat's work.
    • graffiti on train, or not
    • kissing a white woman

• Tuxedo:

  • crown: royalty, his heros (all male), celebrate them as kings. empire state building
  • jazz:

• Charles the First: charlie parker (the king)

  • Cerokee: a song charlie parker played
  • COCO: movement about Cerokee
  • Halo: charlie parker as saint
  • body parts: and feet
  • opera: white western music

• CPRKR: charlie parker

• Jean-Michel-Basquit: collaboration

• Skull: collaboration, love cash, love drugs

Copyright Symbol: challenge property of graffiti.

• critique of distribution of wealth

Did

• Street art to high art

• racism

Dana Schutz Controversy: made a painting called Open Casket

• she is a white artist, depict explicit black body

• subject: Emmett Till

  • Emmett Till get beat up to death (white made a false claim about crime)

Andy Warhol

Warhol Sedgwick

• Edle : drug overdose, want to become her

  • called her superstart

• violence: death series

• brutality: display masculinity for transgender

• hyper-real: protrait whiteness

• got shot

• criticized for lack political position about Hitler (White Burning Car III, in death theory)

• dracula and cinderella, self portrait in drug

• we will never know if he took position

• blending of privacy and public: record mom's death

Pop

• popsicle

• popstick

Electric Chair Ricard Avedon