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Happy birthday Jean-Michel Basquiat: ‘Radiant Child’ documentary in full

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Feverishly prolific New York graf-based expressionist painter Jean-Michel Basquiat would have turned 52 today. That fact jars us because of the inevitable Peter Pan myth that accompanies the premature death of any young artist in any discipline.

Though I hate to pursue it, does it depress us to imagine a middle-aged JMB? Would he be still cocooned and slickly dressed, and now entrenched and heavily sponsored downtown, or maybe bugged-out HR-from-Bad-Brains style, redolent in gray dreads, pursued often and obtained for the occasional commission in order to keep up his paranoid existence in who-knows-where?

Of course, Basquiat’s influence dwarfs the downtown New York art scene in the way that he embodied the New York mix of hip-hop, post-punk, and fashion. But our culture also tends to rely on him in an unspoken way as a kind of purified representation of redundant cliches like doomed youth, avant-garde blackness, and the price of fame. We do best to remember each of those features as part of him—and separately, we do best to remember Basquiat as Basquiat.

In that spirit, we draw your attention to Tamra Davis’s excellent documentary, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Radiant Child, kindly uploaded to YouTube for the budget-minded…
 

 
Thanks to the excellent musician Aybee Deepblak...

Posted by Ron Nachmann
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12.22.2012
03:18 pm
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