Well sure, but it’s not like that’s a great treatment of him. I’m with bell hooks in thinking it was pretty much the opposite. Fingers crossed the new film isn’t so white.
Schnabel’s film is not really a work that imaginatively interprets the life of Jean Michel Basquiat. It treats him as though he is merely a compelling artifact in a particular milieu. The social context that enabled a Basquiat to emerge is what this film is about. That context is always and only white. And it is the “critic” in the film whose voice has prominence, who has the power to name, describe, interpret, theorize. . . . Basquiat is what writer Zora Neale Hurston once defined as a “Negro pet”.
