Basquiat.com is a tribute to Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), an artist who came to personify the art scene of the 80s,with its merging of youth culture, money, hype, excess, and self-destruction.

In his short life (1960-1988), Jean-Michel Basquiat came to personify the art scene of the 80s, with its merging of youth culture, money, hype, excess, and self-destruction. And then there was the work, which the public image tended to overshadow: paintings and drawings that conjured up marginal urban black culture and black history, as well as the artist's own conflicted sense of identity.

He was, all at once it seemed, the ultimate party animal, a wannabe streetkid and grafittist hiding his black Brooklyn middle class roots, an advocate and interpreter of the marginal and dispossessed at the court of the mainstream, an angry black aspirant to the all-white art canon, a precocious talent, a creature of cynical marketing and a fraud, a proto-muIticulturalist, an American original.

As I came across the abundant contradictions, the public perceptions, mythifications and self-inventions that went into the shaping of Basquiat's life and work, the more I wanted to understand how these had all attached to the same person. I set out to create my own picture of Basquiat.

I began research on a book on Basquiat in late 1991, which included interviews with dozens of people who knew him and worked with him. What was initially meant to be a biography turned, in part out of frustration with the strictures of biographical writing, into a work of fiction.

The excerpt is from midway into the book, around early 1985, when Basquiat has become close to his idol Andy Warhol, and media interest in him as a symbol and symptom of a booming art market is at an all-time high.

-Robert Knafo