Basquiat — A Graphic Novel by Paolo Parisi
Usually, I’m a font of positivity about books and film and music and AI Dungeon and anything creative. But I’ve got to say, the flavour of this essay is going to be slightly different. Don’t worry, this isn’t a drive-by pooping on the writer of the book. In fact, it’s more that it brought home to me a couple of niggling fallacies I find at the centre of our narratives about famous people. And those are what I’m going to moan about here.
The first is what I call the Bhaag Milkha Bhaag fallacy. For context, to those who need it, BMB is a movie that focuses on Milkha Singh, an incredibly brave Indian Olympic sprinter, who survived the partition of India, and several tragedies as its result, to become independent India’s first and, until PT Usha, only medal hope in track and field at the Olympics. However, while this is the narrative of the movie, it also becomes the narrative of every action it portrays within it: every act is one of grit, of defying the odds, and of courage, or one where these ideals were not met, but should have been. Even the most mundane actions of the movie are broad-brush-stroke-painted with the overall narrative the film has chosen for his life.
This graphic novel has decided Jean-Michel Basquiat was a tortured genius who was exploited by the world of art in post-punk New York; when all he wanted was to be a star painter, he was forced to do things he didn’t want to do. So naturally there’s page after page of drug-taking, and sleeping around, and complaining about… well, it’s hard to tell about what really, because no attempt is made to explain. We’re expected to buy into the central narrative premise of Basquiat as a tortured genius, and from there proceed to just agree that all tortured geniuses cheat on girlfriends willy-nilly, abuse substances, and complain about ‘the world, maaaan’…
Bringing me to my second gripe: what is it about our culture and the glorification of the creative arsehole? A huge disclaimer here. I don’t claim to know the real Basquiat. All that follows is a statement on the character Basquiat, not the real man. The real Basquiat died of an overdose at 27. That’s younger than I am today; I can’t imagine the pain of a life cut short. That said, irrespective of the quality of Basquiat the man, Basquiat the character is intended to be a snapshot of a misunderstood genius, with a lot more focus given there than say, his art or his dependence on substances. But the portrayal of his genius reads to me like most such portrayal of creative men: like he’s an arsehole who gets a free pass because some people liked his paintings. Like his selfishness is celebrated when a girlfriend is forced to vacate her own apartment in the middle of the night when he brings back two prostitutes, forcing her to walk some of the most dangerous streets in that city. Or the fact that he doesn’t pay rent to stay there, and when he’s asked to get a job, responds with some mumbo-jumbo about wanting to become a star. As if paying the bills is some idiot’s task meant for fools like said girlfriend. Or the fact that women in the book are only portrayed laying naked next to or atop the man as he has profound realisations about the art world. I don’t know what he was really like, but the first word that comes to my mind when I’m introduced to the character in this graphic novel is not ‘genius’, it’s ‘arsehole’. And that often tends to be the case with the tortured artistic genius genre.
Anyway, I really do need to shed light on this graphic novel’s positives too, and there’s some strong ones. First, the aesthetic choices on each page are very strong. Inspired by Basquiat, pop art, and New Wave, each page is honestly quite beautiful, so props there. Second, this is certainly a project executed with a lot of passion for the subject. And a lot of research has clearly gone in to creating a portrait of a young artist, which also stays true to the stylistic choices made both by the artist and the scene of which he was a part. So Paolo Parisi plays with narrative structure, uses interviews with people close to Basquiat as a narrative device to introduce the key moments in the artist’s life, and tries his best to place his art in the context of the eighties New York of CBGB, Andy Warhol, and Lydia Lunch. The spectre of this lost time of artistic experimentation haunts the entirety of the book, and that’s a good thing. It provides much needed context. As does the inclusion of non-contemporaneous influences of Basquiat’s, such as Gray’s Anatomy and the music of Miles Davis. There are several moments where the combination of good research, a passion for the subject matter, and bold stylistic choices really pays off. So huge credit for that as well.
In conclusion, for me, this book was full marks for style, low marks for substance. Maybe it’s to do with the fact that I (admittedly, like every other human being) am getting older, and am losing my patience for misunderstood geniuses. It seems to me that the pursuit of goodness is a lot more meaningful than the pursuit of greatness. It’s just not as sexy a story to tell.
