Painting Pictures: Basquiat (Dir. Julian Schnabel, 1h 46m, 1996)
Alongside his mentor, Andy Warhol, and his New York contemporary, Keith Harring, no artist has enjoyed a greater post-mortem windfall like Jean-Michel Basquiat. His estate is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, his art decorates t-shirts, hoodies and other apparel from designer to fast fashion, his canvases on celebrity walls from Di Caprio to Jay-Z. Basquiat is a brand, a series, at least for the fashionista and the ultra-rich casual art collector, (welcome to the column to the latter), of interchangeable iconography of crowns, skulls, polychromatic lines, blocks of colours, lines of text, and quasi-collage streetwise post-modernism. Jean-Michel today is little more than 'Brandsquiat', a surface level understanding of one of modern art's most illusive figures. The biopic Basquiat (1996), artist Julian Schnabel's cinematic debut is much the same, an off-the-peg rags to riches narration and 'product' that does little to remind us of the brief, but stunning,
