The more expensive he gets, the more demand there is for his work
Jean-Michel Basquiat is one of the world’s most valuable artists. Why?
Thanks to a handful of money men, the neo-expressionist – who died in 1988 – has been transformed from New York scenester into blue-chip investment.
That abundance multiplies the potential profits available to anybody willing and able to buy those artists’ work in bulk. And indeed the most rapid run-up in Basquiat values took place as the market started to price in the fact that the artist had been astonishingly prodigious during his tragically short career.
Basquiat was a reasonably liquid asset class even during his lifetime – from the beginning he was recognised as an artist whose works had real value and could be sold on the secondary market, even if only for a four-figure sum. But that very market-friendliness would become a problem in the mid-1990s, after the artist’s death precipitated something of a speculative bubble in his work.
One of the fascinating themes running through Woodham’s book is the tension between commercial and collectible. Basquiat was in no way avant-garde: he fit quite naturally into the broadly accepted neo-expressionist movement and never faced the “childish scribbles” taunts endured by elder painters such as Cy Twombly.
With Basquiat, the perceived problem was rather the opposite – that the artist was pandering to the market rather than creating something timeless and sublime. Woodham quotes one early collector, for instance, talking about his “commercial taint” and saying that the paintings “seemed to be more about money than art”. (As critic Robert Hughes wrote in 1988, Basquiat developed a reputation in the final years of his life for dashing off low-quality works that he could sell to feed his drug addiction.)
