I should have returned to blogging yesterday but I got really sick, I don’t know, some kind of American bug gave me fever attacks, and I was strung out at the toilet most of the day.
But:Jean Michel Basquait I LA: I am still exillerated.
Why? I have been a fan since the mid-eighties and after his death in 1988 and Andy Warhols in 1987 I hounoured their souls by plastering my condemned apartment in cheap large xeroxs copies of the two. I went downtown to steal some marker pens to colour up the xeroxs but was lured into to drinking and when I came back hours later with the markers - red green black and blue - my friends staying over, the apartment had a sharp stink of smoke cause they had had meticiously dug a hole in the stonewall, taken out brick by brick and made a fireplace and lit it up with old newspaper and a broken chair. The fire had spread up the wallpaper and the apartment was salvaged only when my friends in a common effort pissed out the fire.

Jean Michel Basquiat painted and drew from childhood and on, and his aquiantance and collaboration with Warhol in the eighties was important, but driven merely by JMBs groundbreaking art, and Warhols sense for business.
JMB was, and still is, one the most influential black modern artist and his work broke out of Soho and Lower Eastside, New York about the same time as hip-hop broke out and became popular culture. He worked predominantly with the social inequities of American society in ways that were engaged, formal and available but with great aesthetic force, a language and semantic that was very much his own.
He worked like a demon for seven years and died, 27 seven years old I 1988 of a drug habit, and personalized like no other artist the center over the overheated 1980s art scene in especially New York.

of 115000 hits I chose this one
http://www.artnet.com/ag/fineartthumbnails.asp?aid=2068