Hacker Cinema
Basquiat
1996 · Film · 107 min
Directed by Julian Schnabel
The brief life of Jean Michel Basquiat, a world renowned New York street artist struggling with fame, drugs and his identity.
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3 comments on Hacker News
It depends on your art form and what you’re trying to say. Because once you start optimizing your work for sales, you are deliberately going down a certain path.
I don’t want to criticize that path - because being paid as an artist is a millennia-old thing. The idea that true artists don’t work for money is something that came out of the Romantic era, and many, many world famous historical artists like Da Vinci or Michelangelo were doing a job for rich clients. But it seems to lock you into a path where you need to replicate the same style over and over again, because that’s what you’re known for.
There’s a great little scene in the Basquiat movie about this:
I'm talking about the same kind of work. The same style, so people can recognize you and don’t get confused. Once you’re famous, airborne, you gotta keep doing it in the same way. Even after it’s boring. Unless you want people to really get mad at you…which they will anyway.
https://youtu.be/hfI1YAo32fc?si=05msdQY9-SCJAMhX
I think the Phillip Glass solution of doing a completely unrelated job is probably a better solution, IF you’re trying to focus on expression. It also gives you more material for creating; if you read many writers and artists’ bios, their day jobs directly impacted their work.
My favorite example being Moby Dick - could someone without years of whaling experience even begin to conceive of that book?
I came of age in the 1980s. While I didn't live in NYC, there was a lot of crossover between the New York crowd and the artsy people in my city so I got a lot of exposure to it.
The strange thing is that while I was aware of Basquiat and numerous other NYC artists of the era, I didn't think much of them. They didn't seem special to me because they were just what was going on at the time.
I have a specific memory of when the biopic came out and wondering why they made a movie about Basquiat. I had no real frame of reference. Same thing with music, which was even more of a crossover locally for me than art.
It's only been in recent years I've been able to look back and see what was going on and why it was special. It's mostly a matter of exposure to a lot of other art and music, gaining a lot of context and perspective.
Makes me wonder what I'm not appreciating enough today.
Basquiat in particular requires knowledge of 1970s-80s New York, the birth of hip-hop culture and graffiti, the art world, and a whole lot of other things. In short, Basquiat is appreciated because he was a visceral, anti-establishment, extremely young guy whose work was raw and real, in comparison to the somewhat corporatized minimal aesthetic [1] that was popular at the time. He was also a really good storyteller (most famous artists are) and crafted a great narrative around his life.
Basquiat's work is basically "80s NYC" in high art form. There was so much creativity coming out of the city at that time, it was really magical, especially compared to Lower Manhattan today.
If I had to make a tech world comparison, it might be something like early Apple Computer against IBM. Hippies in garages vs. the suits.
The film Basquiat is pretty good dramatization of his life. So is Downtown 81, which is a creative film starring Basquiat himself. Both are on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn1Q44H2QyE&list=PL411118_g6AQsUKSzdBF0pJGyuN49iaXL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6ibOFlSM6o
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalism_(visual_arts)