Basquiat Quotes

Art is how we decorate space; Music is how we decorate time.

Fire will attract more attention than any other cry for help.

I don’t listen to what art critics say. I don’t know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

Most Young Kings Get Their Heads Cut Off

Kurt Cobain OD'd on heroin before committing suicide, but he also OD'd on fame. Cobain was like Basquiat: They both wanted to be famous, and were brilliant enough to make it happen. But then what? Drug addicts kill themselves trying to get that feeling they got from their first high, looking for an experience they'll never get again. In his suicide note, Cobain asked himself, "Why don't you just enjoy it?" and then answered, "I don't know!" It's amazing how much of a mindfuck success can be.

Pay For Soup/Build A Fort/Set That On Fire

On the night he died - he was twenty-seven - Basquiat had been planning to see a Run-DMC show. When people asked him what his art was about, he'd hit them with the same three words: "Royalty, heroism, and the streets.

I will Basquiat the canvas of your body like a Broadway Junction wall…and Gordon Parks you for those dark midnights when your scent fades.

When I say I love you, Ash, I don't mean that I love you in the way that I love Basquiat or oat milk lattes, I mean that I love you. All that you are and all that you will be and I can't wait to find out who that person is.

If you wanna talk about influence, man, then you've got to realize that influence is not influence. It's simply someone's idea going through my new mind.

What is art? Art is tar, rearranged. Art is tar on canvas or tar on tarp or tar on a naked body. Art is a bird chirping changed into something visual. Art is an image of a thousand beaks breaking into the office of a quack doctor. I know that doctor, and I've personally spoken to ten of those beaks. Art is rhythm, two hands clapping at a urinal while a third shakes off pee to the beat. Good art stays with you your whole life, especially if that good art is a tattoo. Good art is my name, written backwards, inked on your upper lip in a furry font. Art imitates life, just as life imitates Orafoura. Art can be anything from a Manet to a Monet to a painting of money to a missile. Art can save the world, or devastate it. (We could drop another big bomb on Japan, though I'm not advocating dumping Basquiat paintings on Hiroshima). Art rhymes with a bodily function, and everybody should let their creativity rip everywhere from the privacy of their bathrooms to small heated boxes with four of their closest friends. Art is thinking outside that box, and desperately trying to escape.

Don't cry over anything that can't cry over you

You can leave but you can always come back. You can live here again. Life can be a circle, not just a line.

Brian Wilson went to bed for three years. Jean-Michel Basquiat would spend all day in bed. Monica Ali, Charles Bukowski, Marcel Proust, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tracey Emin, Emily Dickinson, Edith Sitwell, Frida Kahlo, William Wordsworth, René Descartes, Mark Twain, Henri Matisse, Kathy Acker, Derek Jarman and Patti Smith all worked or work from bed and they’re productive people. (Am I protesting too much?) Humans take to their beds for all sorts of reasons: because they’re overwhelmed by life, need to rest, think, recover from illness and trauma, because they’re cold, lonely, scared, depressed – sometimes I lie in bed for weeks with a puddle of depression in my sternum – to work, even to protest (Emily Dickinson, John and Yoko). Polar bears spend six months of the year sleeping, dormice too. Half their lives are spent asleep, no one calls them lazy. There’s a region in the South of France, near the Alps, where whole villages used to sleep through the seven months of winter – I might be descended from them. And in 1900, it was recorded that peasants from Pskov in northwest Russia would fall into a deep winter sleep called lotska for half the year: ‘for six whole months out of the twelve to be in the state of Nirvana longed for by Eastern sages, free from the stress of life, from the need to labour, from the multitudinous burdens, anxieties, and vexations of existence’.‡ Even when I’m well I like to lie in bed and think. It’s as if

Chaplin had not merely impressed but formed him. Showed him how any gesture—a kiss, playing with some bread rolls—can be freed from the mundane, imbued with magic. Charlie Chaplin was always turning caterpillars into butterflies. He had used comedy to reveal, and not flee, the truth of the human predicament. He’d roller-skated blindfolded over the void, like a planet circling a black hole. He filmed a factory worker sucked into a machine, fed through its cogs and gears, assailing an age that turns people into things. And Charlie Chaplin had battled the bleak world with—what? Not a knife, not a gun. A cane. Gentle, gestural, the baton of a maestro. Chaplin’s cane, with no disrespect to Hockney, Picasso, or Basquiat, was, in this moment, what Jim Carrey most wanted to save.

Different locations have different energies, and for her, New York is glittering eye shadow, Basquiat graffiti, and strangers with bold dreams. She sees herself dancing in bars, slow-walking across cacophonous streets while men hoot at her womanly goods, wringing all the life she can out of her days in that snap-crackle-pop city.

Boys never become men, they become skeletons and skulls.

He always appreciated expensive things, as if consuming them would make him valuable.

JIMMY BEST ON HIS BACK TO THE SUCKERPUNCH OF HIS CHILDHOOD FILES

When I say I love you, Ash, I don't mean I love you in the way I love Basquiat or oat milk lattes, I mean I love

But the reason I decided to go to New York was because I had seen Iggy Pop and I thought I had seen God. And because I had sent to Interview magazine for Rene Ricard's first book of poetry, The Blue Book. I had never sent for anything before but something told me to do this. I had read that book over and over again like a Bible. I realized that a book can reach out and embrace you like an arm and make you walk away from everything you thought you understood.

This kid was writing saying that they were breaking down some of the racial lines in their towns and communities, because their break dance crews were mixed race, and they didn’t give a fuck. They didn’t care what the Klu Klux Klan said.” - Michael Holman (screenwriter, Basquiat) from nthWORD Issue #8, coming soon...

Don't worry, honey, Suzanne's mother says to Suzanne. One day you'll set the world on fire.

1. sports 2. opera 3. weapons.

Every time Suzanne thinks about her mother's sulfur-blue eyes it rains.

I don't believe in God. But I do believe that each of us has some sort of inner dynamic, that we are not always aware of, that guides us in life to witness certain profound things. These profound things change us forever and bring us closer to our ultimate selves. My relationship with Jean-Michel Basquiat and the death of Michael Stewart were experiences of this nature.

What most people don’t understand about Jean-Michel is that his crazy behavior had nothing to do with being an enfant terrible. Everything he did was an attack on racism and I loved him for this.

High heels are a plot against women, they throw our spines out and stop us from standing on the ground.

He paints a simple square house with a triangle roof that has an "S" inside, "Because, Suzanne, you are my home.

He loved to shock, even with generosity. It was like punching someone.

A lot of the early jazz artists, of course, couldn't even walk through the front door of the hotels and clubs they were playing in and had to enter through back doors and kitchens, and I think Jean felt this was a metaphor for his place in the art world: he had entered through the back door. He broke into the white art world in a way that had never been done before by any black.

He refuses to sell his paintings and writes "NOT FOR SALE" on some of them. He is furious because people are writing about his ghetto childhood and call him a "graffiti artist" and "primitive." "They don't invent a childhood for white artists," he says.

Jean was black and had to present himself as separate from graffiti somehow. Keith was gay and white and could glamorize graffiti in a way that Jean could not. Jean and Keith both understood this.

– Vous êtes comme Ardisson, vous délirez sur Warhol? Il se retourna sur un homme mince à la barbe poivre et sel taillée court façon papier de verre. – Je ne sais pas, dit Bernard en regardant à nouveau le tableau, c’est déjà un peu le passé, Warhol, non? affirma-t-il pour se donner une contenance. L’autre le regarda avec attention et Bernard lui raconta sa découverte des colonnes de Buren, de la pyramide du Louvre et de ces graffitis sur les palissades, ces formes neuves, cet hippopotame. Il se surprit lui-même en employant plusieurs fois le mot radical. Moi aussi, je vais faire mes grands travaux, conclut-it en vidant sa troisième coupe de champagne. – C’est Basquiat qu’il vous faut. L’homme à la barbe de trois jours avait lâché cette sentence d’une voix grave. Vous connaissez Jean-Michel Basquiat? Bernard hocha négativement la tête. Il est encore accessible, voici la carte de ma galerie. – Tu parles encore de Basquiat? le coupa un homme aussitôt rejoint par un autre qui faisait tanguer sa coupe d’un air moqueur. – Ne les écoutez pas, ce sont des gens des musées. La conversation fut vive, d’après ce que comprit Bernard, une exposition allait avoir lieu au Centre Pompidou, inititulée «L’époque, la mode, la morale, la passioné» afin de mettre en lumière les courants artistiques internationaux des années 1980 et personne n’avait cru bon d’y représenter des œuvres de ce Basquiat. – Honte sur vous! leur dit l’homme à la barbe papier de verre. Et tandis que les trois se tenaient tête sur ce mystérieux peintre, Bernard attrapa une nouvelle coupe de champagne et songea à son aïeul.

don’t believe in God. But I do believe that each of us has some sort of inner dynamic, that we are not always aware of, that guides us in life to witness certain profound things. These profound things change us forever and bring us closer to our ultimate selves.

You can’t get your arms to stop making circles in the air if you never say good-bye.

I just looked at a lot of things. And that’s how I learnt about art, by looking at it.

The core of every artist, brand, or organization is believability. I believe Basquiat, Kahlo, Mahler, and Hemingway because they stuck to their core values, whether rain or shine. Their dedication is compelling. I believe what they say in their work because I believe in them as artists.

Patti. Come home. Come on. She’ll be straight with you.” (Basquiat spent most of his opening in a corner, arguing with his new girlfriend, Madonna, known for her performance at Haoui Montaug’s No Entiendes cabaret at Danceteria.) Yet the point of Ricard’s piece was

pegged to Kenny Scharf’s second exhibition at Fun Gallery—that appeared in Artforum in November 1982. Ricard was not a neutral critic. He had dropped by Fun Gallery each morning for a coffee and had convinced Basquiat to show at the gallery, saying, “Jean, chill

covered in Plexiglas and laid across the floor for everyone to walk over. The final, prime gallery was given over to Jean-Michel Basquiat, with fifteen paintings on canvas, wood, paper, or steel, in paint and crayon. New York/New Wave

Words jumped out of him, from the back of cereal boxes or subway ads, and he stayed alert to their subversive properties, their double and hidden meaning. Olivia Laing about Basquiat

How would he know? He’s never been to a museum and seen art from Cézanne to Savage. Basquiat to Kahlo. He’s never eaten in a universal commissary with choices from udon to bucatini, Irish stew to pepián. Just because someone says something over and over doesn’t make it true. And suddenly, after all this time, I truly understand what the word dogma means.

eight different cities before he was sixteen years old. Georgia O’Keeffe lived in the shadow of her “perfect” older brother Francis. And Jean-Michel Basquiat triumphed over poverty to become one of the world’s most influential artists. Kid Artists tells their stories and more with full-color cartoon illustrations on nearly every page. Other subjects include Claude Monet, Jacob Lawrence, Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Beatrix Potter, Yoko Ono, Dr. Seuss, Emily Carr, Keith Haring, Charles Schulz, and Louise Nevelson.

I realized that a book can reach out and embrace you like an arm and make you walk away from you thought you understood.

The smell of his sweat came out of my pores.

Suzanne's mother says, 'Children, you don't need to be going and leaving and looking for a rainbow. The rainbow is here.

But she does not believe in God. And she breaks all her promises.

In general, it could be said that we talk about many things. I’ll try to list them in no particular order. 1) The Latin American hell that, especially on weekends, is concentrated around some Kentucky Fried Chickens and McDonald’s. 2) The doings of the Buenos Aires photographer Alfredo Garófano, childhood friend of Rodrigo and now a friend of mine and of anyone with the least bit of discernment. 3) Bad translations. 4) Serial killers and mass murderers. 5) Prospective leisure as the antidote to prospective poetry. 6) The vast number of writers who should retire after writing their first book or their second or their third or their fourth or their fifth. 7) The superiority of the work of Basquiat to that of Haring, or vice versa. 8) The works of Borges and the works of Bioy. 9) The advisablity of retiring to a ranch in Mexico near a volcano to finish writing The Turkey Buzzard Trilogy. 10) Wrinkles in the space-time continuum. 11) The kind of majestic women you’ve never met who come up to you in a bar and whisper in your ear that they have AIDS (or that they don’t). 12) Gombrowicz and his conception of immaturity. 13) Philip K. Dick, whom we both unreservedly admire. 14) The likelihood of a war between Chile and Argentina and its possible and impossible consequences. 15) The life of Proust and the life of Stendhal. 16) The activities of some professors in the United States. 17) The sexual practices of titi monkeys and ants and great cetaceans. 18) Colleagues who must be avoided like limpet mines. 19) Ignacio Echevarría, whom both of us love and admire. 20) Some Mexican writers liked by me and not by him, and some Argentine writers liked by me and not by him. 21) Barcelonan manners. 22) David Lynch and the prolixity of David Foster Wallace. 23) Chabon and Palahniuk, whom he likes and I don’t. 24) Wittgenstein and his plumbing and carpentry skills. 25) Some twilit dinners, which actually, to the surprise of the diner, become theater pieces in five acts. 26) Trashy TV game shows. 27) The end of the world. 28) Kubrick’s films, which Fresán loves so much that I’m beginning to hate them. 29) The incredible war between the planet of the novel-creatures and the planet of the story-beings. 30) The possibility that when the novel awakes from its iron dreams, the story will still be there.

I realized that a book can reach out and embrace you like an arm and make you walk away from everything you thought you understood.