The door in question (courtesy New York magazine)

New York magazine is out today with a story about a man who claims that he was Jean-Michel Basquiat's drug dealer, and that the artist decorated the door of the Williamsburg bodega where the dealer ran drugs shortly before Basquiat died in 1988.

Halfway through the story you learn that the artist's estate has ruled that, as far as it's concerned, the work is not a Basquiat. That doesn't mean there aren't some interesting thought experiments to probe from associates who think it might be, though.

If it’s a genuine Basquiat, it’s part of his art and life, however diminished both were. “It’s not a happy thought, of someone in despair and drugs at the end of their life, but that doesn’t devalue the art,” says [street artist Kenny] Scharf. “In fact, maybe it increases it.”

It's an argument similar to the one recently made by John Elderfield, who curated the de Kooning retrospective at MoMA and included that artist's controversial later works because, "I think there’s something poignant about an artist painting his own disappearance." Because de Kooning was in the early stages of dementia, those last paintings aren't considered to be completely his, but ultimately they were some of the best in the new show ("I love these last pictures," Holland Cotter wrote. "If Mr. Elderfield’s exhibition had done nothing more than provide a context for them, it would have done a lot.")

So this is in that vein, though there are admittedly more drug dealers in this story.

Artist Michael Holman has reunited the band he started with Basquiat, Gray. Photo courtesy Patrick McMullan Company.

Last year, more than 20 years after the legendary downtown artist Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a drug overdose in his Great Jones Street studio, artist Michael Holman reunited Gray, the abrasive noise band that he started with Mr. Basquiat in 1979. Tomorrow night, in two shows at the New Museum, the group will first perform for the first time since playing at a memorial for the late artist in 1988.

Though Mr. Basquiat eventually drifted out of the band, artists Vincent Gallo, Shannon Dawson, Wayne Clifford, and Nick Taylor also counted themselves as members at various points (as Artnet's Rachel Corbett notes in her piece on the show, which brought the event to The Observer's attention), but tomorrow's concerts will include only Mr. Holman and Mr. Taylor. (Sorry, Vincent Gallo fans.)

"Jean Michel was sort of our spiritual, creative, and aesthetic guide," Mr. Holman says in a 1988 New York article published after Mr. Basquiat's death. "He named the band. He knew the most people on the scene. He knew what was going on." (The band was named for Gray's Anatomy, the book of medical illustrations that was a powerful influence on Mr. Basquiat.)

It's hard to say what it would have been like to see Mr. Basquiat play music, since few recordings exist of the concerts that the band played when he was a member, but musician Richard McGuire says in English music critic Simon Reynolds's history of post-punk music, Rip It Up and Start Again, that the artist played "a fucked-up little toy synth with colored keys through some effects boxes." Sounds amazing.

For those who are unable to attend one of tomorrow evening's shows, Ms. Corbett notes that Gray can also be seen in the 1996 biopic Basquiat, which was directed by painter Julian Schnabel and financed, in part, by the Greenwich, Connecticut, art collector Peter Brant.

Liberal commentary resembles that band of escaped convicts in Woody Allen's Take the Money and Run, who break out of prison shackled to each other at the ankle and have to do everything as a group, like walking along the street and eating in a restaurant. Barack Obama is elected president, and the liberal News Brain runs in one direction, declaring that America is now post-racial, that racism has suffered a fatal setback, that we are at the dawn of a new age of racial harmony. The White House forces the black Shirley Sherrod to resign her top-level position in the Department of Agriculture after right-wingers falsely accuse her of racism, and the liberal News Brain takes off in the opposite direction, proclaiming that race is the albatross around Mr. Obama's neck, his Achilles' heel, the Fury at his back.

May I suggest that these pundits and commentators get themselves over to Film Forum to see The Radiant Child, a sensitive and intelligent-if carefully selective and frankly worshipful-documentary about the rise and fall of Jean-Michel Basquiat? Basquiat was a black artistic prodigy who acquired international fame by the time he was 24 and died of an overdose of heroin 22 years ago this week, at the age of 27. The fate of this gifted, mixed-race son of a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother is resonant with the complexity of black-to use our current shorthand term for anyone at least half-black-existence in America.

Basquiat was far from the wonder his admirers claimed he was, but he was nowhere near the shallow mediocrity that detractors accused him of being. Sound familiar? If it does, it's not because weak and emotional Basquiat and our iron-willed, unsentimental president have anything in common in terms of character or life trajectory. Rather, Basquiat was and Mr. Obama is doomed to be trapped inside a symbolic projection more than most other public figures. As Mr. Obama wrote at the end of The Audacity of Hope, "I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views." How peculiar it is to equate being a fresh arrival to politics with the capacity to project back to radically different people whatever they want to believe. Truly consequential political leaders, like Mr. Obama's beloved Lincoln, are in fact characterized by strong views that are divisive from the start. Yet Mr. Obama seems to have spent much precious time trying to retain that unifying blankness.

So, too, with the conflicted Basquiat. Leaving his upper-middle-class Brooklyn home for good when he was 17, he lived on the street and made his name as a graffiti artist. The white art world took him up and cast him in the role of an outsider who was going to liberate art from what had become arid conventions.

Having made him an iconoclastic street primitive, however, the white dealers and journalists who were crafting Basquiat's public image became conscious of the old stereotype of the primal black man. So they emphasized his intellectual capacities. This young, college-aged man-the product of a cultivated, affluent milieu-read literature! He was conversant with the art masterpieces of the past! Basquiat's boosters might just as well have been patting him on the head for being "eloquent," "rational" and "deliberative."

Basquiat played along, making scrupulously constructed paintings that alluded heavy-handedly to Western intellectual pillars like Charles Darwin and to the span of Western art history. Yet the more he presented himself as unexpectedly refined, the more he strained to shock viewers with discordant colors, stick figures and unsettling juxtapositions. Intellectual and aloof on the one hand, impassioned and emotional on the other. But never too impassioned or emotional to seem "too black."

Basquiat seemed to be striving to satisfy two calculatedly contradictory expectations on the part of the powerful white people who were making his career. No wonder that Peter Schjeldahl wrote in The Village Voice at the time: "I would have anticipated a well-schooled white hipster behind the tantalizing pictures." For his part, Basquiat responded to the pressure on him to play the two different roles of stereotypical black wild child and stereotypical self-taught black intellectual-Jack Johnson and Frederick Douglass-with paintings like Obnoxious Liberals with Eyes and Eggs. The picture's black figure is a short-order cook, and you are perhaps meant to wonder whether he is the artist himself, forced to respond ignominiously to his white dealers' requests for ever more explicit displays of visceral emotion on the one hand and rational detachment on the other.

According to the documentary, Basquiat took criticism badly, becoming furious and falling into a funk before needily coming around and catering to the critic, as he seemed to do time and again with Andy Warhol, who became his unlikely mentor and friend even as he hitched his falling star to Basquiat's rising one and in the process pulled Basquiat down. The Radiant Child is emphatic in its insistence that Basquiat was his own man who always went his own way, even as it inadvertently presents evidence to the contrary.

Yet the most striking refutation of Basquiat's autonomy is his face, utterly open and sweet, or nervous and uncertain yet beaming with joy around Warhol, or hard and exhausted toward the end of his young life. He had a hunger to please, and he turned with honest rage on himself because he had done so much to please so many people of vastly different stripes that nearly all of them, in the end, treated him as an exploitable object. His most powerful works are those late canvases that are not so much painted as covered with words and phrases written in a meticulous hand-almost a kind of anti-graffiti. Some of these phrases have a stinging epigrammatic power. One that occurs frequently is this: "Cowards will give to get rid of you." They will heap money and praise on you and remake you along the lines of their own desire, and work against you behind your back when you disappoint their impossible expectations-until you are defeated, gone and forgotten.

America elected its first black president in a convulsion of outraged disgust with his predecessor, and in the sudden throes of fear, panic and confusion. Mr. Obama will not be excused for his blackness the second time around. We should think now and again of Jean-Michel Basquiat, so that when we are next reminded that Mr. Obama's blackness is, despite our finest hopes, the most significant political fact about him, we will not be surprised. 

editorial@observer.com

FROM BASEL: THE Swiss have a few things to teach us about art collecting, given their appetite for it and the superb way they exhibit their works. Case in point is the Schaulager. This private museum, funded by the Hoffman-La Roche family, is my personal favorite private museum building anywhere. Its Herzog and de Meuron structure is elegant and brutal, masculine and sensual, and the foundation exhibits mostly what it owns-the ultimate collector dream.

Indeed, the most interesting art dialogue going on in Basel last month wasn't at the huge art fair but at the wonderful Schaulager and Beyeler museums, where Matthew Barney and Jean-Michel Basquiat had big-budget blockbuster shows. Maja Oeri, the Hoffman family member in charge at the Schaulager, had done a huge Barney deal for the exhibition, buying up an entire archive of his "drawing restraint" works, and gifting half to the Museum of Modern Art. But in the inimitable manner of the artist, this show of Barney demonstrated everything but restraint. The exhibition was massive, with huge melting white plastic sculptures including the big melted deck of an entire whaling ship. Several rooms of drawings and videos were interspersed with Albrecht Durer prints. In Mr. Barney's work, I find less Durer and much more Dali, specifically Salvador Dali's famous 1938 installation "mannequin rotting in a taxicab." In my opinion, Mr. Barney looks more like a surrealist than any Old Master, so sprinkling in a few Durer prints just makes the show bigger, and harder to digest.

The genius of this 42-year-old man is undeniable, but the huge production of films, performances, drawings and sculptures by an artist who maintains an inaccessible holier-than-thou persona leaves a collector like me feeling a bit bloated. Isn't it time for Mr. Barney's handlers to bring him down from his ivory tower and allow him to mingle freely, and with confidence in his art stardom? Until then, the whole thing feels like work we must bow to; rituals of futuristic Minoan, Trojan or even Shinto gods that Mr. Barney creates in his mind, but never gives us the chance to really believe in. By the end of the show, I'd experienced my own auto-da-fé: I'm a solid believer, but I had no choice in the matter.

ELSEWHERE IN BASEL, the Beyeler Foundation itself is the most tasteful and special place, designed by Renzo Piano before he became the go-to guy for every museum on American soil. In the past few years, the Beyeler has indulged us with fabulous shows of Fernand Leger, Alberto Giacometti and Edvard Munch. This year, Sam Keller, ex-Basel fair director and now the Beyeler director, brought in the first big show of his new regime: Basquiat. The show was a way to move the institution forward and closer to the art of today, and a way to open the door to the museum's future, since founder Ernst Beyeler himself died in February of this year.

The Basquiat "cartel," a loose-knit network of dealers and collectors, most of whom were there for Art Basel and who own many of the works, began to trash the show immediately. The dis: It was "overhung" and didn't properly represent the hierarchy of the great works (theirs) as compared to the not-so-great works (everybody else's).

In the Swiss manner, the curators had precisely selected, ordered and categorized the works by year, size and medium, and had put all the works on paper together. So it was perhaps a bit overhung, too packed, and somehow the pristine white walls of Renzo Piano perfection were struggling with the colorful, dark, sometimes violent paintings.

Spotting Francesco Clemente at the private opening, I asked him whether he liked the show and whether seeing the retrospective of an artist he knew so well made him sad. He said he was melancholy in his reminiscence but that he actually liked the overhanging and wished, if anything, that the show had been more chaotic-more like the man himself, less "Picasso-esque." Basquiat's short life was chaotic and wild, itself a creative performance, and his works were a part of all that. But this blockbuster show was a big move for the Beyeler, and I decided to enjoy it rather than find fault, since I probably will never see a better one.

THE HAUSER AND Wirth Gallery offered a private charter from Basel to Milan, where the Trussardi foundation was sponsoring a Paul McCarthy exhibition titled "Pig Island." The Trussardi foundation and its curator, Massimiliano Gioni, have done several big-vision, challenging shows, from Maurizio Cattelan's controversial hanging of three child mannequins from a tree to Pawel Altheimer's 80-foot helium balloon in the shape of his naked body. This time, on view was a McCarthy installation of a large portion of his studio, a Styrofoam island covered in remnants of sculpture, broken pieces and tools, books, magazines and junk food, a diorama of an artist's mind, frozen in time. The artist said to me, of it, "I know that at some point I stopped."

I had a hard time understanding it, this pile of unfinished and broken works, mixed with files, dust and empty Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets. It's the remnants of his artistic process viewed as a performance. This type of project is for the hard-core believers: Nothing to buy or sell here, the whole installation just sits and collects dust. It was, at least, fearless.

IN ATHENS, COLLECTOR Dakis Joannou had a new installation in his Deste foundation, which he curated himself. (Unlike the "Skin Fruit" show of his collection recently on view at the New Museum, and curated by Jeff Koons.) He showed a wide range of works and permanent installations, which included Jeff Koons' Moon, which looked fantastic in silver; Urs Fischer's metal cast of a big black hole, which also looked great from above and below; and Maurizio Cattelan's self-portrait, in which "he" breaks through a museum floor and peeks out (an edition of this same piece made over $7 million at auction last May). The new show also included some newer talent. There was a full room of colorful Josh Smith paintings, two large monochromatic Barnaby Furnas paintings, a few Andro Wekua's and a leather Pawel Althamer self-portrait, among other good works.

ON THE ISLAND of Hydra, Dakis Joannou exhibited a new work by Mr. Cattelan in an abandoned slaughterhouse perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean. The untitled piece was a miniature bed about four and a half feet in length, and in it were two full-figure half-size sculptures of the artist, perfectly dressed in matching little black suits and perfect little black laced-up shoes. (One mini-Maurizio had slightly longer and grayer hair.) This extremely strange self-portrait seemed a fitting way to end my tour-the artist in bed, wedded to only himself. Were they dead bodies, as in the viewing at a funeral, or a comment on the artist's inability to relate to anyone else? This piece was powerful in a disturbing way.

As I was leaving the island the next day, I bumped into the artist in the marina and asked if he was on his way back from revisiting his dual images. He quipped, "Why would I do that? I hate my work!" As if art speaks for itself and there was nothing more to say. In the harbor of this beautiful Greek island, with the sun shining, the bright blue sea glimmering, a mild hangover lingering, for a moment, I felt I had the answer I was looking for.

editorial@observer.com

Adam Lindemann is an art collector who may own works by some of the artists discussed in his columns.

Six years later, the Belgian-born Mr.  Van de Weghe appears to have made a $1.2 million profit on the 2,100-square-foot Soho loft. Dubbed “THE most elegant condominium in Soho!” by a Corcoran rental listing in the building, it isn’t hard to see why Mr. Van de Weghe garnered such a high price. The buyer is an LLC called Real Mercer 77, a limited liability company first registered this past August care of the LLP Withers Bergman, who could not be reached for comment.

cmalle@observer.com

From the Times:

Thus, we enter into voodoo season for the art market. Until the numbers come out, cold sweat, gastric knots, and ‘I got a bad feeling about this' are all we have to go by. (Mind you, these people probably aren't even Democrats.) But reading Ms. Vogel's story, one is touched by the thought that somewhere there is an incommensurably small and lapped section of New York where the biggest worry as of November 3, 2008, has to do with the price of a Richard Prince painting.

That, and the fascinating story of "Untitled (Boxer)," a 1982 Jean-Michel Basquiat painting owned by Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich. If you ever wondered where the dollar and change royalty from your copy of Ride the Lightning went, now you know. Christie's has estimated the painting to sell for $12,000,000 to $16,000,000.

Back in June, we told you about how U2 bassist Adam Clayton was auctioning off a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died of a drug overdose in 1988, at Sotheby's in London. Now Metallica durmmer Lars Ulrich is doing the same thing, but this time at Christie's in New York, The New York Times and other news outlets are reporting today. According to The Times: "The Basquiat, which goes on the block Nov. 12, depicts a victorious black boxer, his hands waving in the air, against a richly painted background filled with the artist’s signature graffiti scrawl. The figure is part hero, part warrior, part victim. It is also said to be autobiographical."

Apparently the 1982 painting, which Mr. Ulrich bought in 1999 after seeing it on display in Vienna, is expected to fetch between $12 million and $16 million, which could set a new high for the sale of a Basquiat (the current record is $14.6 million for "a primitive figure with clenched teeth, his oversize hands held high in the air" from 1981, and Mr. Clayton's Basquiat painting sold for a little over $8 million this summer).

Mr. Ulrich acknowledged the potential downsides of holding an auction on the cusp of the new Great Depression: “Of course it’s an awkward time to sell, but I’ve always been about taking chances,” he said.

Will more rock stars with Basquiat paintings be following Mr. Clayton's and Mr. Ulrich's lead? As they say, two's a coincidence, three's a trend!

The painting, a 6-foot-square acrylic, oil stick and collage canvas, was completed in 1982 (some reports say 1983) when the artist was 22 years old. He died of a drug overdose in 1988.

“It seems especially appropriate that a work by Basquiat should end up in a music studio, since so much has been said about the relationship between his art and music,” Oliver Barker, of Sotheby's Contemporary Art department, told the BBC. The painting had been hanging in U2’s studio until now.

No word on whether Bono plans to do something philanthropic with the money.

Strangers, AMC Village VII, 2 p.m.

It could be a setup for some sort of awesome romantic comedy: a man and woman lock eyes on a train while both traveling to Berlin for the World Cup finals before accidentally switching backpacks. But, of course, things get more complicated as the couple in question is an Israeli man, and the woman hails from Ramallah but has been living in Paris, trying to escape the daily terrorism that comes with life in the Palestinian territories. Brace yourself for relationship metaphor for political conflict! Directed by Erez Tadmor and Guy Nattiv. (Watch the trailer above.)

My Life Inside, Village East Cinema 3, 2:15 p.m.

Lucía Gajá’s documentary (making its North American premiere at the festival) tells the harrowing story of Rosa Jiménez, a girl who got herself to the United States from Mexico looking for a better life. She met a man and married him. She had a baby. But then several years later a 2-year-old boy she was baby-sitting died in her care, and she found herself in jail for two years in Austin awaiting trial for murder. Guess whether Mexican immigrants are treated fairly in jail in Texas! Sigh.

The Universe of Keith Haring, AMC Village VII, 6 p.m.

Another day, another documentary about an era-defining New York artist. The Universe of Keith Haring is a look into Haring’s life—from his days living in a tiny and conservative Pennsylvania town to the big time when he was the man on the downtown '80s scene, hanging out with Madonna, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. Friends and family add anecdotes, but most will enjoy all the fun stuff about New York in the '70s and '80s.

Lake City, BMCC Tribeca PAC, 9:30

The good news about Lake City: Sissy Spacek is in it—and when is she not ever totally wonderful? The news that might make you go hmmm? So is Dave Matthews and he is playing a drug dealer. The movie is about a man (Troy Garity) and his son on the run, returning to his mother’s (Spacek) house in Virginia. Mother and son try to reconnect and heal a troubled, and somewhat haunted past.

The Cottage, Village East Cinema, 11:59 p.m.

Writer-director Paul Andrew Williams is in charge of this horror-comedy (Is this a new genre now? It sure seems to be) about a wimpy man who finds himself holding a gangster’s daughter hostage with his truly criminal brother (Andy Serkis, of Gollum fame). Everything seems to go wrong with their plan, and when their hostage escapes, they find even scarier things out in the woods. Oh, Brits.