Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-artist-jean-michel-basquiat

by karimford • 6 years ago

84 46 6 years ago

phnofive2• 6 years ago

I feel like I’m looking at a magic eye ( I also haven’t yet been able to ‘’see’’ one of those ) when I see art like that linked here. Is there a trick to appreciating it beyond what I can see?

bcraven• 6 years ago

Read the associated text, the art is specifically and purposefully not meant to be "easy".

jahnu• 6 years ago

The best way to appreciate it is to learn the history and immerse yourself in the culture.

Contemporary art is not typically created for instant gratification or understanding but rather for an audience familiar with the world within which it sits.

Like Free Jazz or heavily peated whiskies there is a path into appreciation that isn't necessarily short. Also it just isn't for everyone. I love much of those things but struggle to get anything from contemporary dance. Precisely because I haven't invested much time or effort into it.

Finding a local contemporary artist scene and socialising with these people can be extremely rewarding, especially if you yourself are not a full time artist.

bitexploder• 6 years ago

Art to me is basically history in picture form. I think that is why it continues to have intrinsic value year after year. Art on its own can be really boring, but in context it can be quite interesting.

acjohnson553• 6 years ago

I can relate. I actually used to work at Artsy (the company who published this article), and before I worked there, I felt much the same way. What I learned after being immersed in the art world is that occasionally, art will "speak" to me immediately. But more often, it grows on me as I understand the context of the art and who made it. This is definitely the case for me with Basquiat, whose work can look like childish scribbles at first glance.

In my farewell email to my Artsy coworkers, I wrote that as I really began to engage with the art world in my time there, I realized I had gained a whole new layer of perception. I was seeing new references and callbacks everywhere in the world around me.

So what I would say is that if you feel like it's going over your head and want to invest the time, it can be extremely rewarding to go down the rabbit hole. You can do this by reading articles, watching documentaries, visiting exhibitions, and finding spaces inhabited by enthusiasts.

Some things to check out:

- The book The $12 Million Stuffed Shark

- The film Exit Through The Gift Shop

phnofive2• 6 years ago

Thanks, I appreciate your guidance. I’m admittedly self-conditioned to snap judgements on aesthetics, and despite reading the article, that’s probably what blocks me from getting it. Glad to know there may be a cure!

secondcoming• 6 years ago

I felt the same about reading poetry when in school. None of it ever clicked with me and for exams ("Explain why this poem is great") I would just regurgitate various points teachers and books had told me about the poems. I didn't typically agree with any of it, and didn't care about it either.

Regarding art, I never studied it but I have two books. One is a collection of photos taken by Francesca Woodman, and another is on about Art Brut. I quite like the philosophy behind Art Brut and had never heard of it before buying the book. Something clicked.

op03• 6 years ago

First step involves asking yourself what is Beauty? To You.

Most people are unconscious of what they themselves find beautiful.

What are those things that have made something inexplicably stir in your head?

If things on that list (which varies massively from person to person) doesn't overlap with something in front of you, it doesn't matter what tricks of appreciation anyone presents.

keiferski4• 6 years ago

Basquiat in particular requires knowledge of 1970s-80s New York, the birth of hip-hop culture and graffiti, the art world, and a whole lot of other things. In short, Basquiat is appreciated because he was a visceral, anti-establishment, extremely young guy whose work was raw and real, in comparison to the somewhat corporatized minimal aesthetic [1] that was popular at the time. He was also a really good storyteller (most famous artists are) and crafted a great narrative around his life.

Basquiat's work is basically "80s NYC" in high art form. There was so much creativity coming out of the city at that time, it was really magical, especially compared to Lower Manhattan today.

If I had to make a tech world comparison, it might be something like early Apple Computer against IBM. Hippies in garages vs. the suits.

The film Basquiat is pretty good dramatization of his life. So is Downtown 81, which is a creative film starring Basquiat himself. Both are on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn1Q44H2QyE&list=PL411118_g6...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6ibOFlSM6o

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalism_(visual_arts)

TigeriusKirk• 6 years ago

I came of age in the 1980s. While I didn't live in NYC, there was a lot of crossover between the New York crowd and the artsy people in my city so I got a lot of exposure to it.

The strange thing is that while I was aware of Basquiat and numerous other NYC artists of the era, I didn't think much of them. They didn't seem special to me because they were just what was going on at the time.

I have a specific memory of when the biopic came out and wondering why they made a movie about Basquiat. I had no real frame of reference. Same thing with music, which was even more of a crossover locally for me than art.

It's only been in recent years I've been able to look back and see what was going on and why it was special. It's mostly a matter of exposure to a lot of other art and music, gaining a lot of context and perspective.

Makes me wonder what I'm not appreciating enough today.

mturmon• 6 years ago

Since we're on the subject, here's a link to a beautifully-written 1999 piece on the transitory nature of the 80s East Village scene, from which Basquiat emerged:

https://www.artforum.com/print/199908/crime-and-misdemeanors...

The author, Gary Indiana, was the art critic at the Village Voice for several of those years. His fiction can be off-putting, but he was there for it all and his wised-up nostalgia is perfect for the subject. Here's a similar piece of his, from 2004, that's a little more forgiving:

https://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/features/10557/

itronitron• 6 years ago

There is no trick to appreciating it, just that people that own work by a particular artist have a vested interest in talking that artist up and getting others to 'appreciate it.'

The best advice I can give is to spend time with a particular work of art.

Go to a museum or gallery, pick a specific painting or sculpture, and then come back to visit the same work of art multiple times, preferably on different days of the week, at different times and under different lighting conditions.

A good work of art will show you something different every time you visit.

acjohnson553• 6 years ago

Respectfully, I think you're missing an important piece here. Much modern and contemporary art is not going to speak to most people on its own.

Art serves as a physical token of something bigger -- a shared experience of culture, time, place, narrative, or whatever. Sometimes, the technical craftsmanship of the piece is self-evident. Sometimes, it's not. Sometimes, the craftsmanship, or lack thereof, is completely beside the point.

One of the things that really changed my experience of art was doing guided tours at museums. Invariably, I come away with insights that would not have come to me, no matter how long or how many occasions I might have visited a piece.

mtalantikite• 6 years ago

As some others have noted, having context for the art will deepen your understanding of it, which might make you appreciate it more or maybe even appreciate it less. Either way it'll help lead you into the work.

For an artist like Jean-Michel Basquiat it's especially important to understand it in the context of what it meant for a young black man to create art in an art world that was (and is still) predominately white. Keeping that in mind, take a look at the "Untitled (Rinso)" work that is shown in the article. Rinso was a brand of soap that introduced a blue powder in the 1950s and had advertisements that would say things like "Whiter Washing" with smiling blonde women. You have his infamous crown icon, with "No Suh No Suh" under it. All of these elements can help lead you to see the commentary he's making.

There was a documentary a number of years ago about him called "The Radiant Child", which might be a good place to start.

nicbou• 6 years ago

I'm not an artist, but I have grown to appreciate art more and more. I think you learn to appreciate art the same way you learn to appreciate any other product.

The first step is to accept that some things just aren't your cup of tea, even if all the true fans love it. I don't like Holy Motors, Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, and IPAs. Popularity is a signal, not an obligation.

The second and most important step is to learn how the sausage is made. It gives you a much greater appreciation for the final product. My recent interest in gardening completely changed my forest walks. It quite literally made me see the forest for the trees. Likewise, I learned to appreciate film by paying more attention to the camera work, the sound design, and the many other things that make great movies great. YouTube has many great video essays that will show you a lot more than meets the eye [0].

The third step is to understand the context behind a work of art. My favourite example is Guernica by Picasso [1]. Look at it, then listen to this [2] from 1:12:54 to 1:16:00, then look at it again. You will get a far different impression of that painting. If you grew up in the 90s, the sound of a computer modem probably elicits some sort of emotional response to you. It would seem weird if you robbed the phenomenon from its context. That's also true for art.

That, or date an art student for a few years.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-woNlmVcdjc

[1] https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/collection/artwork/guernic...

[2] https://soundcloud.com/james-hewston/blitz-logical-insanity

dfxm12• 6 years ago

You can probably take the advice of the subheadings of the article in order to be an anything.

keiferski4• 6 years ago

I printed this HN comment out about 3 years ago and still have it on my wall as motivation. It's from an article about a lifelong artist that never quite "made it" and I think it is a good answer to the question.

Compare him to Picasso. Picasso never said "I had to pay the rent." He never considered earning money with anything other than painting. When he had no money he lived in friends' apartments. He faced and accepted poverty and hunger. Picasso did not compromise. Same with Van Gogh. Paintings on their own have no value. Buyers pay for the life story of the painters. The more heroic is your life the more expensive your paintings. Painter's job is to market himself in order to create a life mythology. This guy just painted. He did not create a myth around his life.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16092168

i_love_limes• 6 years ago

I agree far more with the top response to that quote than I do to the quote.

tanjtanjtanj• 6 years ago

I think you and that commenter misunderstand that quote. Picasso's is not the only story that an artist must follow to become renowned, just one of them. The fame and fortune around an artist are nearly entirely the product of the mythology surrounding them and the connections they have with other influential people rather than their output.

tartoran• 6 years ago

That commenter retired their account:

Account retired April 2020 (would delete but mere users aren't entrusted with this ability). Reasons? Legion.

Proximate: the moderator "dang" discourages contributors from questioning billionaire ubermenschens' statements from on high. Obedience to the megaconsuming 1% is the last thing we need right now.

Ultimate: The SV locus of the tech scene, of which HN is a cog, is a marketing tool for extremist hypergrowthers (and their propagandised aspirants to world-consuming greed). This is the most dangerous class of humans ever to have existed, constituting a grave threat to the entire biosphere. Undermining it, a task beyond my talents, would be valuable. Continuing to contribute to it is however unconscionable.

pintxo2• 6 years ago

Creating a market for you product is an art in and of itself.

jfengel2• 6 years ago

By "this guy", I take it you're referring just to the guy from the original piece. Basquiat very much created a myth about his life -- partly in collaboration with Andy Warhol, one of the greatest self-mythmakers in the art world.

I don't mean to diminish Basquiat's art or his story. I'm just affirming (by way of clarifying) what you said: the artist's life is a part of their art, and part of what you pay for.

keiferski4• 6 years ago

It's not my comment, I was just quoting it. But yes, the original commenter meant the man in the article.

lemax• 6 years ago

Susan Sontag sums up the ultimate social achievement of the artist well. It's about the Aesthetics of Silence. The more withdrawn an artist becomes, the more celebrated. The ultimate level according to her, is not communicating, and not even creating anything.

So far as he is serious, the artist is continually tempted to sever the dialogue he has with an audience. Silence is the furthest extension of that reluctance to communicate, that ambivalence about making contact with the audience which is a leading motif of modern art, with its tireless commitment to the “new” and/or the “esoteric.” Silence is the artist’s ultimate other-worldly gesture: by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, consumer, antagonist, arbiter, and distorter of his work.

– Susan Sontag, The Aesthetics of Silence

manofkent• 6 years ago

Requires a PBS membership, but this is a good film on Basquiat:

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/basquiat-rage-to-ri...

tigertigertiger6• 6 years ago

I know I will be down voted to hell for this but maybe somebody can tell me where I'm wrong in my thinking. First of all I know nothing about art so that already disqualifies everything I will rant now.

For me artists are nothing more like the embodiment of the survivor ship bias. I can appreciate something that takes skill to create, be it a craft, a poetry, or even a photorealistic drawing. I can appreciate something that raises emotions in me (I'm aware that rasing emotions is a highly subject criteria as well). I can appreciate something that is new and unique.

None of these things is true for 99.9% of art, this artist included. I think these artworks are not different from atleast thousands of other graffiti doodles from other people. Somehow people start to praise this guy (seemingly random?) instead of anyone else. That's just survivor ship bias.

I know people say it all the time but it's true "I could have made this". My point is that probably most of art critic's couldn't tell the difference between a random doodle of some random art student and most famous abstract art.

It's also not about having an unique idea, banana on the wall is not something special, people do crazy things all the time. There are probably thousand of wanna be artists that tape things on walls and make some random things in hope of getting famous and could tell you some deep thinking why it criticises our modern society.

So for me art is just a random circle jerk of people telling each other that this special guy is good and the rest isn't and if you don't agree or see it you are just someone that has no idea about art. And my take on really high expensive art is that it's just a form of tax evasion or similar goals.

pintxo2• 6 years ago

For me artists are nothing more like the embodiment of the survivor ship bias. I can appreciate something that takes skill to create, be it a craft, a poetry, or even a photorealistic drawing. I can appreciate something that raises emotions in me (I'm aware that rasing emotions is a highly subject criteria as well). I can appreciate something that is new and unique.

A lot of reasons to like art.

None of these things is true for 99.9% of art, this artist included. I think these artworks are not different from atleast thousands of other graffiti doodles from other people. Somehow people start to praise this guy (seemingly random?) instead of anyone else. That's just survivor ship bias.

I would rather say it's some sort of network effect. The better known you are, the more interest in your art, the higher the price. Interest and higher prices attract more interest generating even higher prices, loop.

I know people say it all the time but it's true "I could have made this". My point is that probably most of art critic's couldn't tell the difference between a random doodle of some random art student and most famous abstract art.

Isn't this the same every developer said about Dropbox? Amazon? Writing an online file-storage/sharing app is not hard, writing an online bookstore is not hard. But actually executing it for 26 years (in Amazons) case and building in from there to the empire it is today, that's the art.

It's also not about having an unique idea, banana on the wall is not something special, people do crazy things all the time. There are probably thousand of wanna be artists that tape things on walls and make some random things in hope of getting famous and could tell you some deep thinking why it criticises our modern society.

I'd say it's about execution as well as marketing, sometimes one can compensate for the other.

So for me art is just a random circle jerk of people telling each other that this special guy is good and the rest isn't and if you don't agree or see it you are just someone that has no idea about art. And my take on really high expensive art is that it's just a form of tax evasion or similar goals.

It certainly is also an investment and way to signal status, probably always was. But does that minimize the value for you, if you find an attribute of it to be appreciable?

jfengel2• 6 years ago

We're talking here about a very narrow segment of Fine Art that has practically nothing to do with the lives or work of the vast majority of artists -- even successful working artists. It attracts a lot of attention, and is often spoken of as if it's the most refined and pure and important form of art, but most artists don't see their art that way.

Don't worry about the "banana on the wall". It's the art equivalent of a reality show.

If you want to be interested in art, go to some galleries, talk with the people there, and ask what the art means to them. There are lots of different kinds of art and poke around until you find one that interests you.

And if you don't want to be interested in art, don't. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, despite the implication from some circles that there's some kind of taste you're failing at. Just ignore them. It's not really the "circle jerk" you imagine it is, but neither is it really that important that you're not inside this particular circle, jerking or otherwise.

tigertigertiger6• 6 years ago

I think your comment really helped me. I don't have anything against art itself. It's more about glorifying artists and artworks to level that just can't get explained.

probably_wrong• 6 years ago

You are probably missing the context. To a non-programmer, C and Python look the same.

Take Citizen Kane. I'd call it a 7/10 film and kinda boring, but that's because I'm seeing it in a "post-Kane" world. At the time, however, it was so revolutionary that people still call it the best film ever made. Nowadays it's quite standard because everyone has been building on it ever since

While I'm not going to disagree with you regarding some art, there is a point to be made that what to us, un-cultured people, may seem like random scribbles could actually be something revolutionary. We simply don't notice it because we are missing the context.

I do believe, however, that you are right and that there's an element of luck too. But that's not exclusive to art - how many technologies are we using right now not because they are the best but because they got a lucky break at the right time? And then again, while many good painters may never get their big break, I doubt there are that many bad painters who get famous.

tigertigertiger6• 6 years ago

Thanks for your opinion. I just tend to disagree with your examples.

Programming languages are in their core something like a craft. There are about 700 languages and even if you know nothing about programming languages at all, if I explain to you the concept of how difficult it is to make one and that only about 700 of them ever got made, you will probably understand that this is not something a lot of people could do even if they try. It's also something that can be compared and gets popular and approved because of its usefulness.

The same can be applied to technology, the best technology will may not be the most adaptive one but we can compare them and if they would get the same possibilities (exposure, marketing, timing etc) people would probably agree which one is the better one to some extend (ebay vs amazon) I don't see the component in art. There is just to many of it and if we would show 10.000 people 20 artworks and let them rank them from best to worst I would imagine the list would be different from the ranking of art critics.

keyrat2• 6 years ago

Do you get the music world and how it works? It's very similar, and someone who didn't get music could make the exact same arguments you're making.

The visual arts take a tiny bit more effort to get into but once you're over that hump it's very similar.

tigertigertiger6• 6 years ago

Of which kind of music are we talking about? If you mean some art of abstract music or music that gets approved from some elite circle, I would indeed make the same arguments and don't see a flaw.

My main point is that there is no objective comparison between thousand of pieces and when we take the choices of the elite circle and compare it to intersubjective choices of the masses there would be little to no overlapping. So my point would still be "Why is your elite opinion more worth or correct than the collective opinion of the whole world?"

zeruch2• 6 years ago

"I could have made this"

That is a common trope but it misses the immediate counter...."but you didn't".

Many can code, not all come up with something that takes off, regardless of talent or skill. Any number of things can go into that. Art is very similar in that regard.

I say this as someone with a bias; I've worked in tech for the last 20 years and I've been a paid illustrator and painter since high school (Art and Commerce isn't alien to me).

tigertigertiger6• 6 years ago

Well I did it. I made art myself, even special one. I made one of the biggest perler bead art in europe with about 70.000 beads (maybe even the world?). Would I appreciate my artwork? As some kind of skill - yes (having immense duration and boredom), as something that has a special intrinsic variable beside being bigger than other pieces - no.

I'm aware that every skill and talent takes some kind of luck to "make it". I just say that art lacks any objective qualities and is just based on choices of some elite circle that don't even match public opinion.

powersnail• 6 years ago

I remember I talked to a writer friend, and said to her how I had a lot of great ideas of stories, and I'd perhaps one day quit my job and become a novelist. Back in high school, I wrote quite a bit of short stories and thought myself as pretty okay. I was encouraged to actually write something about it, a scene, an outline, a beginning, anything.

I tried for a weekend, scratched my head through it, and came up with an embarrassing draft for a chapter. As I tried to translate the ideas in my mind to actual words, all the flaws, holes, and awkward characters suddenly showed up. My ingenious ideas were not a blueprint of grand palaces, but a pile of ugly rocks scattered all over the place. I barely managed to connect them in a circle.

She told me, that the fact that I had a scene written was already better than most people who regarded themselves as "wanting to write".

There is a mismatch in people's expectations. Without going through the actual work, many people regarded their vague concepts in their imagination as genius. They are often not.

That's why I've stopped listening to people who say "I've never done XXX, but how hard can it be".

acjohnson553• 6 years ago

I'm not going to try to convince you you're wrong. You can change you own mind about this, but it takes investment. Many, many people have found that journey toward "getting art" to be life enriching.

I'll say that for me, what blows my mind about modern and contemporary art is the willingness of individual artists to follow a conceptual idea waaay beyond what is reasonable. Whether the destination ends up being critically acclaimed is beside the point. You have to at some point be able to not care in order to play, because artists, more than anybody, know just how much of a crapshoot it is to get commercial attention.

tacistbce• 6 years ago

All arts are a form of story telling, and all story tellings are a form of art.

What makes a story? Or better yet, what makes a good story? There're a lot of good answers for that, which means there isn't a one-liner fits all answer.

There is, though, a common ground for all the answers: stories are about all the different and complex ways we communicate, with ourself and each other. The ancient paintings were epic. They were big, full of gods and battles. It easy for us to look at those and think that this is what people liked at the time, but the truth is that this is the only thing the knew. When Van Gough presented a photo of a simple room or a pair of shoes, it is not is paintings techniques (though very good) that was exclaimed, it was the message and the novelty: a pair of shoes also exist, and therefore can be an object of a painting - they deserve a story.

There are infinite amount of ways to tell a good story, but there is only one way to distinguish one: a good story will always stick.

Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

Related Stories