‘Art by its very essence is of the new… There is only one healthy diet for artistic creation: permanent revolution.’
Jean Dubuffet wrote those words in 1963, and when Jean-Michel Basquiat burst on to the New York art scene 20 years later — barely out of his teens, untrained and black — he seemed to embody them. Together with his friend Al Diaz, he had grabbed attention in the late 1970s with a campaign of cryptic graffiti signed SAMO© targeted on the SoHo gallery district. Born to middle-class Haitian-Puerto Rican parents in the South Bronx, Basquiat didn’t waste time tagging trains. He knew the value of location; his dad was an accountant.
Photographs of the graffiti fill a room in the Barbican’s exhibition Basquiat: Boom for Real. ‘SAMO© As An Alternative 2 ‘Playing Art’ With The ‘Radical? Chic’ Sect On Daddy’$ Funds’ reads one; ‘SAMO© As A Result Of Overexposure’ reads another.
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