Basquiat: The Embodiment Of Contemporary Culture

Contemporary society is defined by a zeitgeist of collective imagery and ideas. Culture dictates a spattering of sampling, iconography and methods of re-appropriation that merge high and low culture, filtered through an international, visual lexicon. Paris Fashion Week, currently street-obsessed and logo-driven, is no different. Which is why the opening of a retrospective honouring the late Jean-Michel Basquiat, at Paris’ Fondation Louis Vuitton, could not be more timely: no single artist throughout history has been more influential to the establishment of the street-obsessed, logo-driven, digital age in which we now live.

He might have been surprised to find himself the toast of Paris on Monday evening, at a star-studded opening night. Born to a middle-class family in Brooklyn, New York, in 1960, Basquiat made Manhattan’s eclectic, ungentrified Lower East Side his first canvas, tagging poetic inscriptions on the facades of buildings and gritty alleyways under the pseudonym, SAMO. The art world quickly took notice of this radical teenager’s intellectual approach to his craft, and Basquiat’s mode of expression soon transitioned to painting.

While Basquiat’s entire artistic oeuvre, spanning 1980 until his untimely death in 1988, is defined largely by his aesthetic of recycling – his earliest work utilised found materials from the street such as discarded doors – and visual sampling, the themes and techniques the artist consistently drew from, including music, consumer culture, race relations, police brutality, literature, verbiage and art history, exude more relevance today than ever before.

Basquiat was the purveyor of cult culture as it relates to art and creativity. Art was his tool in defining who he was, a mechanism for his self-made mythology. He anticipated the post-internet world in which we live, foreseeing today’s digital, copy-paste aesthetic through a fast exchange of repeated imagery, as proven through his prolific use of Xerox and collage.

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