Basquiat Hardcover – March 15, 2011

Jean- Michel Basquiat's now world famous art had its gestation in the pseudonym SAMO [an acronym and a corrupted shortening of the phrase "SAMe OLd S***"] with which he signed his spray painted sayings on walls and buildings in SoHo.[Manhattan,N.Y.] According to to the author, Leonhard Emmerling---"In essence, the SAMO religion was a retort against the way in which society uses values and ideals, an art product tailored to a starched society". The following are some of Basquiat's SAMO musings and some of my own interjected: "SAMO as announcing the unheroic gringo pilot, Paul Tibbets dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima from the plane "AnolaGay". "SAMO as hearing the voice of Charlie Parker-- They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But man, there's no boundary line to art"." SAMO as suggesting Egypt is in Africa". "SAMO as a John Coltrane country preacher cool". "SAMO like works of art, people are suppressed". SAMO as those who fear the truth oppose its exposure". "SAMO as jazz is the music of Americans who were not allowed to be Americans"." SAMO as seeing Miles Davis as a "prince of light" and not "darkness".SAMO as suggesting death is a passage, a door into a different form of existence". SAMO as pledging to avenge the criminal triumph of falsehood over truth". As the writer,Franklin Sirmans states in his essay "In the Cipher"[ Basquiat and Hip-Hop Culture]: As "Gringo Pilot suggest,Basquiat's poetics were acutely political and unabashedly direct in their commentary on colonialism, racism, and class warfare". This critical awareness in the art of Basquiat is what the film-"Basquiat" by Julian Schnabel obfuscates.

You wont regret to have this book. good quality !!! Shipped on time,I bought Pollock and Basquiat. You wont be just reading the book, both of them has lots of pictures of his works that you will enjoy to see.Thanks again!

I’m not the type of person to leave reviews but this distributor/bookseller provides an easy and efficient service that I don’t usually come across from non-major book distributors on Amazon. My book is in great condition and exactly as advertised. The catalogue is great and I’ll definitely be buying another book!

Any book this thorough and well designed makes it easier to review the artist himself . . . as well as the misguided approach of other monographs like this one.Like Keith Haring, another graffiti artist, Basquiat had a canny sense of design, and a far better sense of color. His work is immediately recognizable; it sells for millions. By OD'ing on heroin, Basquiat immortalized himself Like Lautrec and Van Gogh, as a "bad boy" outsider whose too-short life took a tragic trajectory.When his works become so expensive, his life so tabloid-worthy, very few critics dare suggest his output is like any other artist's--uneven! Not that Superman wears no clothes at all, but too often he throws on a familiar flashy cape he's worn before and expects his viewers to imagine the rest of his outfit. Robert Hughes made the memorable observation that Milton Avery's slapdash anatomy "punched holes" in his compositions. With such "critical" criticism all too rare, this book might have made a truly useful contribution by daring to explain where, how, and why Basquiat's work fails.Like Picasso, Basquiat fell victim to media hype. Knowing that trendy collectors would pay for anything he dashed off, he became a sorry example of Gresham's law, with his mediocre works elbowing aside his better ones. (His VERY early drawings, not illustrated here, are breathtakingly deft and finished.) Like Picasso, he left much to dislike: hermetic scrawlings and thumb-your-nose messiness that this book would have us applaud as uniformly brilliant. How did heroin alter or impair his work? Which are his best paintings, and which are too off-hand to bother with? The book ignores such questions. One of the book's final illustrations--a sketchy 3-minute knock-off of a Renaissance image---is hyped in terms that would make Raphael blush.Until collectors quit buying art as they do designer clothes, for the label/signature alone (Gucci/Dali, Picasso) or the store/gallery where they was bought it (A&F/Gagosian, Pace), why should art books bother to instruct readers in discrimination, as the "Good, Better, Best" volumes do for American furniture?

An excellent reference to Basquiat's work.

I don't know if it's because I didn't paid enough atention but the book I received was way bigger than I expected, which is awesome since artbooks are better when they are big! I always purchase Taschen books because they have the best editions for a really cheap price. I was really surprised, the book was big, with hardcover and only for a few $. It was worth it!

The pictures in this small book were a decent selection and sharpness--no complaints. The commentary offered some context, albeit distracting and unclear at times. Here's an example of Emmerling's editorializing: "Basquiat's work thus documents the progressive construction of the artist's discordant identity, of a man grappling with the reality that he could make little use of the patterns available to him--either of his father's existence as an accountant who adopted the ideals of the white middle class, or the ghetto kid attitude of the graffiti sprayer" (89). How did Basquiat "make little use of the patterns available to him"? He has over 2000 works of art. How did his father "adopt the ideals of the white middle class"? What does that even mean? And what is a "ghetto kid attitude"? There are more examples of Emmerling not explaining or citing his claims, many of which involve Emmerling playing up the "racist" attitudes of collectors and how Basquiat was a victim.