The Billiken's Bluff

I read Don DeLillo's epic novel, Underworld this past October. The novel, while fiction, basically serves as an almanac of American History during the Cold War. It covers everything from Bobby Thompson's Shot Heard Round the World Home Run in 1951, to Lenny Bruce performing standup comedy about The Cuban Missile Crisis, to the AIDS epidemic.

One story within this story concerns a young NYC graffiti artist, Ismael Muñoz, who in the early 1980s is sought out by Manhattan's artworld luminaries. The Ismael character is based on the real life graffiti artist turned bonafide artist, Jean Michel Basquiat. Basqiat is currently being featured in a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The exhibit runs through June 5. I'm definitely planning on checking it out with my boo.



Jean Michel Basquiat first gained notoriety as a teenage graffiti poet and musician. By 1981, at the age of twenty, he had turned from spraying graffiti on the walls of buildings in Lower Manhattan to selling paintings in SoHo galleries, rapidly becoming one of the most accomplished artists of his generation. Astute collectors began buying his art, and his gallery shows sold out. Critics noted the originality of his work, its emotional depth, unique iconography, and formal strengths in color, composition, and drawing. By 1985, he was featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine as the epitome of the hot, young artist in a booming market. Tragically, Basquiat began using heroin and died of a drug overdose when he was just twenty-seven years old.