{"id":54,"date":"2003-12-23T03:17:36","date_gmt":"2003-12-22T18:17:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/archives\/2003\/12\/23\/basquiats-second-death\/"},"modified":"2006-06-21T18:28:46","modified_gmt":"2006-06-21T16:28:46","slug":"basquiats-second-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/archives\/2003\/12\/23\/basquiats-second-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Basquiat&#8217;s Second Death"},"content":{"rendered":"<p\/>Remember, that homeless painter I mentioned in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.unknowngenius.com\/blog\/archives\/000034.html\">one of my entries<\/a>, last summer?<\/p>\n<p\/>He used to sleep on or under his own canvases under Sarah&#8217;s window in Paris. Any cynical mind might have quickly pointed he was shooting for the Jean-Michel Basquiat theme. Whether wittingly or not. It had definitely not escaped the notice of hordes of bobos who now inhabits this neo-trendy chic neighbourhood: every other day, you could see neatly dressed young chaps congressing with the artist around a bottle of wine or a flask of whisky.<\/p>\n<p\/>When I popped by in September, he was nowhere to be seen in the street and we simply assumed he&#8217;d been set-up in a fancy loft by one of his protector and on his way to become world-famous.<\/p>\n<p\/>That was somewhat accurate, as it turns out he was the object of a few articles and documentaries on French TV around this time and even got <a href=\"http:\/\/news.independent.co.uk\/europe\/story.jsp?story=446421\">an article in <i>the Independent<\/i><\/a> (free transcription <a href=\"http:\/\/amsterdam.nettime.org\/Lists-Archives\/nettime-l-0309\/msg00111.html\">here<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p\/>I learnt about all this in the last issue of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technikart.com\">Technikart<\/a> my roommate brought home. But the article also mentioned that Joseph had recently died in a Paris hospital (possibly some liver disease or something else related to his insanely high daily consumption of alcohol)&#8230;<\/p>\n<p\/>I bet all the two-bit modern-art snobs who rushed on the &#8220;down-and-out genius&#8221; wagon as soon as they smelled the possibility to cash in are jubilant: with our modern-time Basquiat dead, the legend is likely to thrive and the prices of all these paintings they traded for bottle of cheap whisky will soar to high heaven, at least for as long as the media hype lasts.<\/p>\n<p\/>R.I.P. Mr. Joseph the Painter<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Remember, that homeless painter I mentioned in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.unknowngenius.com\/blog\/archives\/000034.html\">one of my entries<\/a>, last summer?<\/p>\n<p>He used to sleep on or under his own canvases under Sarah&#8217;s window. Any cynical mind might have quickly pointed he was shooting for the Jean-Michel Basquiat theme.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}