The Artist as Social Critic: essay on jean-michel basquiatIn May 2021, Morgan presented her essay “The Artist as Social Critic: The Transformation of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Art as it Enters Multiple Arenas” to the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard College. The 23,000+ word essay engages the artistry of Basquiat, tracing his evolution from a pseudonymous and poetic graffiti writer to a world-renowned career artist. Her essay provides a theoretical framework for analyzing Basquiat’s use of graffiti techniques as speech acts, while also tracing the fate of subversive, ‘critical art’ as it becomes embraced by the very realm it protests.
Morgan delineates Basquiat’s core themes as they emerge in his graffiti writing and paintings, and unlike past scholarship, traces these themes as they emerge as speech acts with provocations, critiques, and invitations to dialogue. Her research explores Basquiat’s graffiti as a public intervention, his career as an artist in the gallery circuit, and the posthumous commodification of his work that extends to current day. She draws upon the online archive of photographs organized and maintained by Henry Flynt, which documents Basquiat’s early SAMO© graffiti writing in the late 70s. Ultimately, the essay examines how Basquiat’s art and its dialogical potential are transformed as it becomes aestheticized and commodified.
May 2021
Roles: Researcher, Writer
“New Art, New Money” from New York Times Magazine (1985)
EXCERPTsBasquiat’s paintings carry within them critical provocations about everyday life and, through a canny interplay of text and visual, assert themselves as speech akin to the artist’s earlier graffiti. Of course, much has changed. And as the critiques become more fervent, they become more commodified. The oscillation between asserting a who and becoming a what, a key dimension of Basquiat’s SAMO© graffiti, now emerges with a different and intensified meaning. As Basquiat inserts himself into the art world through his paintings, what Arendt describes as fundamental to action, agency, and speech, Basquiat is being transformed into a what, as a commodity. And thus the speech in his art becomes vulnerable and subjected to the forces shaping the buying and selling of paintings in the art world. As shown earlier, Hollywood Africans addresses the social ills of large systems and industrial forces by pointing to cultural stereotyping and representations from Hollywood to everyday life. The decision to purchase a movie ticket, to listen to hip hop, to even consume Basquiat’s artwork all gesture to a broader form of domination that materializes through the routines of everyday consumption. Basquiat’s painting summons similar forces of his SAMO© graffiti, which both portray the masquerade of domination in public and private life, through public and private rituals.
— from Chapter 2: The White CanvasThis oscillating dialectic of creative expression and external subjection, of the realm where the critically-infused art breathes and lives as speech, and the realm where it is confined to commodification and spectacle, is one which endures in the presentation of Basquiat’s art. But this gestures towards the grand dilemma of artists, who as Baldwin suggests “disturb the peace.” The forces which Basquiat was alive to — that he explored in his socially, culturally, and politically-infused critiques — are the same forces that promote and undermine all artists as they attempt to introduce critical art into the world.
— from Chapter 3: Branding the basquiat experienceAdditional work available upon request.