Do you think this painting is worth $48.4 million?

Earlier this year a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, depicting two figures stoned on the hallucinogenic drug PCP, was offered for sale at Christie’s in New York. ‘Dustheads’ was given an estimated sales tag of $25–35 million. In the end, the hammer came down at $48.8 million, a sum that easily broke the previous record for the artist, $26.4 million, which was achieved last November. It was the fourth time in 12 months that Basquiat’s record price had been smashed, and confirmed the artist’s dominance of the contemporary market.

Such record-breaking at auction tends to elicit valedictory statements from auction houses and Christie’s Loic Gouzer duly obliged: ‘“Dustheads” is pure, concentrated energy, freedom and honesty.’ But it is what Gouzer went on to say that is of more interest: ‘Ten years ago [Basquiat] might have been perceived as a misfit. Today, he is the most collected artist of sportsmen, actors, musicians and entrepreneurs.’

This statement, with its defensive undercurrent, attests to a gulf between what the market now makes of Basquiat and how art critics and historians have, at least until relatively recently, rated him. Basquiat’s career was short-lived and dramatic. He emerged as part of a graffiti collective called SAMO spraying buildings in Lower Manhattan in the late 1970s. Then, in quick succession, he formed a band (which included Vincent Gallo), appeared on Glenn O’Brien’s television programme TV Party, starred in an indie film, popped up in Blondie’s video for ‘Rapture’, and met and hung out with Andy Warhol. He also decided to move his artwork from the streets to the gallery and, from his debut solo exhibition at Annina Nosei’s gallery in 1981, he enjoyed a meteoric rise that saw its apotheosis in his appearance on the cover of the New York Times Magazine in early 1985.