If he were alive today, Jean-Michel Basquiat would be 54 years old: an artist comfortably in mid-career, maybe forgotten, maybe looking forward to a retrospective or two. Would his star have faded? Would he have moved on from his early style, or would he still be making the hotheaded, volatile paintings and drawings he ground out so quickly in the 1980s? Who can say? Basquiat stormed the New York art world in 1981, but in 1988, with more than 1,000 paintings behind him, he overdosed. He will never be more than 27.  Basquiat’s eternal youth, reflected in the energy and anger of his paintings and drawings, goes a long way to explaining the endless queues for Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now’s the Time, which opened earlier this month at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. With more that 80 artworks, it’s the most significant retrospective of Basquiat’s work in North America since the Brooklyn Museum’s show in 2005. (In April the Brooklyn Museum will be presenting a smaller show of Basquiat’s notebooks. Both the AGO and Brooklyn shows are curated by Dieter Buchhart, an Austrian art historian.) Some of his art, notably the works on paper, look fantastic after 30 years. Others look hopelessly overblown. But all of it attests to a career of promise – snuffed out too soon, and perhaps celebrated today for the wrong reasons.  The show starts, perhaps inevitably, with Basquiat the legend. Near the start of this show is the famous black-and-white portrait of Basquiat commissioned by Interview magazine in 1982 and shot by the renowned Harlem Renaissance photographer James van der Zee. The elder artist was 95; Basquiat was 21. The young man sits pensively in a chair that might as well be a throne, a cat on his lap, the trousers of his suit speckled with paint, his faux dreadlocks sticking out in half a dozen directions. Slumped forward, his head in his hand, he exhibits the same melancholy beauty seen in a video clip of him tagging a New York wall with spray paint in 1981.  The video is the only representation of Basquiat’s experiments with graffiti – as a teenager, he and a friend wrote disjointed poetry all over downtown New York, tagged with the name SAMO© (pronounced “same-o”, as in “same old shit”). That makes sense. For Basquiat, contra the stereotype, was not by any means a dedicated graffiti artist who found himself embraced by the art world. He was, rather, a smart and ambitious painter who was enthralled by the deliquescence of bankrupt 1970s New York. And though he occasionally used some tropes of graffiti in his mature work – such as the recurrent crown motif – his paintings feel much closer to German art of the same period, such as the rough figuration of Neue Wilde painters such as Walter Dahn and AR Penck, than to street art. Anyway, Basquiat understood why the term “graffiti artist” stuck to him for so long: “They’re just racist, most of these people.”  It’s hard not to conclude that Basquiat’s best years were his early ones. The paintings from 1981 and 1982 display a fixation with anatomy – the sprinter Jesse Owens’s right foot is pinned down like a butterfly – and a nearly Dadaist gift for wordplay, in the form of dissonant shopping lists or strings of inscrutable letters. Later works have little of that mystery, and there are some dire late collaborations with Andy Warhol that do no favours to either artist.  Basquiat was also better on paper than on canvas, and was much more gifted with formal questions of lines and shapes than with the challenges of all-over composition. Many of Basquiat’s canvases end up looking imbalanced and adrift, but the more economical drawings – such as a series of skulls from 1982, done with bold circuits of black lines – have an anti-humanist bile that recalls Jean Dubuffet.  Things went south for him after 1982, but Basquiat was no innocent outsider corrupted by the art world. On the contrary, he was an intensely ambitious middle-class boy (the family owned a brownstone in Brooklyn’s chichi Boerum Hill; his father drove a Mercedes) who knew his art history – and was especially sensitive to the complex absence/presence of blackness in western art.  One of the finest pictures here is a drawing from 1984 that features two heads of Pablo Picasso. The left one, of Picasso in his 20s, refashions his self-portrait from 1906 – whose African influences mark the start of what European art historians, in a less enlightened age, used to call his époque nègre. The right one is of Picasso in his later years, with bald pate and giant schnoz. Basquiat then defiles the older Picasso with incisive lateral strokes with an oil stick.  The easy reading is: young artist good, old artist bad, don’t trust anyone over 30. But it’s not so simple – the scratching out is praise as much as defilement, a call to attention as much as an erasure. “I cross out words so you will see them more,” he once told Robert Farris Thompson, America’s foremost historian of African art. “The fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them.”  Now’s the Time wants to make the case for Basquiat’s place in art history, and I wish it had done so more through an engagement with his innovations, his debts and the uses of his hermeticism and inscrutability. But it often turns patronising. There are multiple invocations of Martin Luther King Jr, and an excerpt of his “I have a dream” speech is literally on repeat in one gallery – as if Basquiat, whose career began two decades after the March on Washington, was the first black American artist ever to reckon with racism and justice.  Influences, black and white, are absent, and the difficult, complex questions of representing blackness throughout history are almost totally elided in favor of an uncritical celebration. His 1981 painting The Ring, in which a bare-chested pugilist with a face recalling a west African mask raises a spear in a boxing ring, could have been a great artwork with which to wrestle with the African influence on modern western art. Instead the curator gives us, in the text alongside the painting, a jaw-dropping recourse to Jay Z, who apparently once rapped: “They can’t keep a good man down ... They will never ever take my crown.”  The invocation of Jay Z – who proclaimed himself “the new Jean-Michel” in his atrocious song Picasso Baby – is dire, but telling. It is Basquiat’s posthumous celebrity and financial value, rather than any aesthetic accomplishment, that too often forms the basis for this show’s arguments on his behalf. (The chronology of his career in the catalogue includes something I have never seen before: multiple entries for auction records, including the $49m paid by Malaysian partyboy Jho Low for one canvas from 1982.) In the neoliberal culture industry where Jay Z is one of several kings, one’s commercial success is dispositive proof of artistic greatness. But curators have, or should have, a deeper commitment to the artists they exhibit, and let us see for ourselves what they made and what they mean.
The artist died aged 27 and his best work still excites; but in burnishing the legend, and even revealing the prices his paintings sold for, this show risks trivialising the art