Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art – The Biography of a Painter's Meteoric Rise from Downtown Graffiti to International Fame

“A smart, crackling chronicle of fast game, the ’80s art market, [and] the attraction of destruction.”— Village Voice A bold and vivid biography that chronicles the dazzling rise and tragic death of Neo-expressionist artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. In less than a decade, Jean-Michel Basquiat went from being a teenage graffiti artist to an international art star. His meteoric rise to fame coincided with the outrageous excess of the heady ’80s art boom. A fixture of the downtown scene, with its explosive mix of music, fashion, art, and drugs, he soon became involved with some of its most celebrated personalities, including Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, and Madonna. Basquiat fulfilled that cynical aphorism: Die young and leave a beautiful corpse. But Basquiat did more than that: he left a beautiful corpus.