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Popular Culture Review
Basquiat is unquestionable as he stands as “the world’s most famous black
artist” (Hoban 16), succeeding in an art world described in Conradian terms by
bell hooks and Nicholas Mirzoeff as the “heart of whiteness.” Greg Tate offers
some further perspective on Basquiat’s accomplishment in insisting, “no area of
modern intellectual life has been more resistant to recognizing and authorizing
people of color than the world of the ‘serious’ visual arts” (234). In both films,
the several scenes that downplay or clean up his hard drug use, his confusing
racial politics, and his complicated family life cannot be separated from scenes
that directly frame his sexual practices as unquestionably heterosexual as both
work to create the image of a more community-minded, respectable, and
authentically black Basquiat.
Downtown 81 presents Jean as both heterosexual and communityminded and respectable. In the event that Jean’s several interactions with white
men and women throughout the film jeopardize the image of him as
authentically black or as part of the black community, one particular scene
serves to mitigate such doubt. Early on in the film, before we see Jean
consorting with several white friends, we see how he interacts and gets along
with two graffiti artists; one is played by an actual graffiti artist, Lee Quinones,
and the other by Fab Five Freddy. Not only does the manner in which Jean is
greeted by Freddy as “my man” show that he is accepted by legitimate black
men, graffiti being their legitimating factor, but he proves himself to be as or
even more authentic than they are. When Basquiat asks them if their graffiti is
“another commission” and they respond, “sort o f . . . it’s legal,” Jean appears as
the “real” street artist as the graffiti art he does throughout the film is by no
means commissioned or legal. From there Jean enters a hip hop club complete
with a DJ spinning and scratching records. That Jean is clearly a part of this
community is not only established by the way the black club goers greet him
with handshakes but also in the way the DJ acknowledges his presence on the
microphone by saying, “Jean-Michel is in the house now.” Thus, his relations
with white men and white women are framed within the film’s insistence that he
is a “real” black man.
Schnabel’s film addresses Basquiat’s status in the black community as
well, but it also takes on the artist’s drug use and family life. Basquiat “does
seem to soft peddle the drug angle” (Rimanelli 2). Although we see the artist
smoking marijuana and snorting cocaine, we never actually see him shooting
heroin. The scene in which Gina comes home to find a nearly dead Basquiat and
a used needle on the bedroom floor shows us that this was heroin induced, but
the film does not establish just how central Basquiat’s heroin use was to his
death.
The artist is made more respectable and family-oriented in Schnabel’s
film also in the way his relationship with his mother is framed. Not one to
abandon or ignore his mother, who has been institutionalized, Basquiat visits her
once at the beginning of the film and then tries again at the end only to be turned
away by the guard because visiting hours are over. Although Basquiat is not the