Terça-feira, 7/6/2005
Build a Fort, Set That on Fire
Julio Daio Borges
I can't think of an artist more difficult to judge than Jean-Michel Basquiat. Basquiat's death from a heroin overdose at the age of 27 in 1988, and his beginnings as a graffiti artist on the streets of Brooklyn, give his life the typology of the doomed poet. He grew wealthy and became a celebrity-a close friend and protégé of Andy Warhol, Madonna's boyfriend (briefly), the subject of a 1996 film by Julian Schnabel. Most problematic of all, Basquiat was black. He had to honestly reckon with his race, yet the white art world encouraged that self-exploration and paid him handsomely for it. Thus the question is: How much of that reckoning was directed, and how much of it was real? In other words, how much of Basquiat's outsized reputation has to do with his art, and how much of it either with the cynical exploitation of the racial and social facts of his life, or with his resentful reaction to the perception that he was less an artist than a commercial fabrication?
Lee Siegel, na Slate, num ensaio sobre Jean-Michel Basquiat (que olhando assim, meio de lado, lembra um pouco o Arthur Bispo do Rosario).
Julio Daio Borges
7/6/2005 às 15h25
|
