BOMB ALL LINES

We tend to think of Jean-Michel Basquiat as a brash outsider working his contacts in the Warhol circle to convert street cred into art cred. And while there is a good deal of truth in that, there’s also another side to the story.

From the point of view of the dealers, critics, and collectors in the lily-white New York gallery scene, Basquiat’s work was a blast from another universe, the mostly Black and Latino world of graffiti and hip-hop. But to the creators of the nascent hiphop culture, Basquiat, a middle-class Haitian-American–Puerto Rican Brooklynite who had gone to posh private schools, was a bit of an outsider, too, not quite a full-fledged member and certainly not a pioneer. In regard to “post-graffiti” artists like Fab 5 Freddy, Futura, Toxic, and Rammellzee, Basquiat was looking to raise his authenticity quotient. In the early 1980s, some of the hip-hop crowd he associated with were themselves moving toward the mainstream art world, applying skills honed on subway cars to hangable—and saleable—canvases. Others were less interested in appealing to the art world, content to create their own separate culture and address the concerns of their communities on their own terms.