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Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (Revised Edition) | 
 enlarge | Author: Phoebe Hoban
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
List Price: $18.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 264916
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 416
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.3 x 1.2
ISBN: 0143035126
Dewey Decimal Number: 920
EAN: 9780143035121
ASIN: 0143035126
Publication Date: October 19, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
This minutely reported book is as much a portrait of the frenzied, prodigal New York art world of the 1980s as it is a biography of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died of a drug overdose at age 27 in 1988. Basquiat, one of very few African American artists to acquire an international reputation, left a thick web of dealers, collectors, friends, lovers, paintings, drawings, and used syringes behind him. Author Phoebe Hoban seems to have unblinkingly interviewed or examined them all. While she duly registers Basquiat's sad childhood, with his unstable Puerto Rican mother and punishing Haitian father, she doesn't make much of the deeper veins of sorrow and self-destruction that may have motivated the artist and informed his art. Rather, she allows his celebrity, which whisked him from street urchin to art star, to be the central trajectory of this story. The Warhol protégé would probably approve, as he was the primary obliterator of his own psychological depths, throwing away his short, phenomenally productive life in the edgy club and drug scene of downtown Manhattan. The miracle is that Basquiat was so good, and so serious, an artist, surrounded as he was by hype and cash. Hoban's book is a fluid, intricate, authoritative dissection of a time, a place, and--almost--a person. --Peggy Moorman
Product Description
The bestselling biography of the controversial artist, and a vivid account of the fast times in which he lived--and died
Painter Jean-Michel Basquiat was the Jimi Hendrix of the art world: in less than a decade he went from being a teenage graffiti writer to an international art star; he was dead of a drug overdose at age twenty-seven. Basquiat's brief career spanned the giddy '80s art boom and epitomized its outrageous excess, from its art dealers to its drug dealers, from its clubs to its galleries. A legend in his own lifetime, Basquiat became a fixture in the downtown scene and got involved with many of the period's most celebrated personalities, including Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, and Madonna.
Phoebe Hoban's Basquiat, the first biography of this charismatic figure, charts the trajectory from the artist's troubled childhood to his volatile passage through the art world of white dealers and nouveau-riche collectors. As much the portrait of an era as the portrait of an artist, Basquiat is an incisive expose of the eighties art market that paints a vivid picture of the rise and fall of the graffiti movement, the East Village art scene, the avaricious dealers, and the out-of-control auction houses. Ten years after the artist's death, Basquiat resurrects both the painter and his time.
* A New York Times Notable Book
* Basquiat appeared on the Los Angeles Times and Voice Literary Supplement bestseller lists
"Compulsively readable. . . there is enormous value in it, especially in Hoban's depiction of the glitzy 1980s art world, which is sharply etched and deadly accurate." --Patricia Bosworth, The New York Times Book Review
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| Customer Reviews: Read 20 more reviews...
 Skilled February 24, 2008
This is a thoroughly researched and complete work for the general reader. Hoban has magically gotten through to elusive and sometimes marginal subjects and interviewed them. She tells the familair story engagingly. Someday Basquiat's estate will be more cooperative with authors and we'll know more. There is still keen interest in Basquiat's creations; one wonders what the expiration date is, how enduring his work will be.
Highway Chile January 9, 2008
"Painter Jean-Michel Basquiat was the Jimi Hendrix of the art world" so says the back cover of the Quick Killing in Art. They both died at 27. There are numerous comparisons - Hendrix even wrote a kind of epitaph for Jean in "Highway Chile": "I couldn't say what went through his mind/ Anyway, he left the world behind/ But everybody knows the same old story/ In love and war you can't lose glory."
And so begins the complex art story of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Avant-Guard New York 1980's painter. A brilliant extremist, who was harbored or harassed by the biggest art dealers in New York. Once he even poured a jar of fruit and nuts on a buyer as she was leaving his studio. Once he served eels for lunch for his art dealer at the time. The message was clear
There was one big difference between Jean and Jimi: the critics. Rock 'n Roll critics, a new breed in the 1960's loved Jimi. Art critics, a breed that has been around for hundreds of years, loved to tear Jean to pieces, or damn him with faint praise, or concentrated on his drug problems.
They say Jean started his art career living in a cardboard box, painting graffiti, but
the real story was he was a perpetual runaway kid starting at 15 and started up with a friend SAMO that sprayed painted aphorisms on walls next to or near art galleries. He sold t-shirts and postcards on the streets. His career painting started when he painted up a friend's refrigerator door. PS1, an art show that featured at least 20 other artists opened up his success, and it took off from there. So the line from Highway Chile reminds me of him too: "Now you'd probably call him a tramp/But I know it goes deeper than that/ He's a highway chile". Money and success didn't change this.
Jean often used signals and signs of hobos in his art. "Nothing to be found here"
"He came, he saw, he painted," author Hoban says in her concluding essay on Basquiat in the last chapter. He moved from art dealer to art dealer and famously never giving up his slacker/starving artist attitude "problem". Staring down people cold instead of saying hi back, smoking spliffs in front of their faces, and his addictions, that started way before he was famous and only got worse.
Andy Warhol became Jean's mentor, and Jean was known to say, I put the painting brush back in Andy's hand, I did more for him than he did for me. They collaborated in a show, where one painting was painted over by the other. The critics hated the show, calling Jean "a mascot of the art world" Jean's love for Andy faltered, and the relationship fell out, much of this chronicled in the Warhol Diaries.
Then Jean's drug habits, a heroin addict, again, a bad slacker/starving artist habit he never could shake. Jean was an addict in the Burroughs describes in Junky, "Junk isn't a kick, it's a way of life".
Although his art career fell out, or seemed to, a few years before his died, I believe, in the end (the author doesn't state this) that he was suicidal, and became even more reckless when Andy died in Feb. 1987, but it was the anniversay of Andy's birthday, August 6th, 1988, that must have hit Jean in the worse way: on the 12th of Aug, 1988, he died of a heroin OD at the age of 27.
Robert Hughes, art critic, wrote a review after his death, "Requiem for a Featherweight", and proclaimed Basquait's work worthless. It took another generation to absorb the erratic, childlike, thrown together, the crossed out words, the detailed small photocopies, cartoon inspired paintings, all huge, 5' by 7' by the way.
Author Hoban details everything in Basquiat's life in her bio of him, but there is so much reading between the lines.
"His dusty boots is his Cadillac".
 Not too much info January 2, 2008
This review is based on the fact that I have read the book twice and still do not know the actual spirit of Basquiat. If you are curious about the snobs of the Art World go ahead in read. She said that Basquiat gave Klaus Nomi a STD. The author needed to site the source od this information.
 heresay January 13, 2007
Not a bad read...but not a factual one either. The movie nor the book provide the reality of the Jean Michel Basquiat story. Enjoy it as gossip filled fiction literature.
 Most useful for history buffs, not terribly enlightening for fans of Basquiat's work July 4, 2006
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
Phoebe Hoban's BASQUIAT: A Quick Killing in Art is one of the few biographies of the painter whose brief career (1980-1988) coincided with the disgusting obsession with profit of the Eighties' art world. There is little here about his work itself, and in order to understand why Basquiat is so important you'll need a collection of his pictures.
The two big themes of the book are drugs and lots of sex with myriad women and men. I had the impression (like many, I assume) that Basquiat's sinking into drug addiction happened only after his corrupting fame, but Hoban reveals that he had been seriously abusing drugs since the age of fifteen. Basquiat's making an income by selling his body is also exhaustively treated, as are his relationships with Klaus Nomi, Rene Richards, Suzzane Mallouk, and others. The reader notices that a lot of things are being left out. It is obvious, and Hoban herself makes an allusion at one point, that Basquiat was somewhat well-read, but Hoban never talks about his intellectual activities or, with the exception of Cy Twombly, his discovery of his artistic predecessors.
After recounting Basquiat's death, there are two final chapters. The first describes the fights over his estate over the following decade. Hoban has Vrej Baghoomian coming out looking like quite the scumbag, and she describes the case of the several Basquiat forgeries. The chapter ends with a chilling visit to Basquiat's mother, now left extremely poor and mentally fragile even though she was entitled to fifty percent of all proceeds. The final chapter finally focuses on Basquiat's art itself, its themes and the painter's techniques. However, it isn't as substantial as other presentations of Basquiat's work.
If you love Basquiat's painting and really could care less who the man was, Hoban's biography has little appeal and that is why I have rated it rather low. I think that the book would be most attractive to those seeking to understand Basquiat in a historical context along with the 1980s art scene as a whole. That the work is very well-sourced makes it a useful guide to further research.
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