Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (Revised Edition)

Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (Revised Edition) by Hoban, Phoebe. Paperback edition. ISBN: 9780143035121.

Painter Jean-Michel Basquiat was the Jimi Hendrix of the art world: in less than a decade he went from being a teenage graffiti writer to an international art star; he was dead of a drug overdose at age twenty-seven. Phoebe Hobans Basquiat, the first biography of this charismatic figure, charts the trajectory from the artists troubled childhood to his volatile passage through the white art world of dealers and nouveau-riche collectors, chronicling the meteoric success and overnight burnout that made him an instant art-world myth. As much the portrait of an era as the portrait of an artist, Basquiat is an incisive expose of the eighties art market that paints a vivid picture of the rise and fall of the graffiti movement, the East Village art scene, and the out-of-control auction houses. Ten years after the artists death, Basquiat resurrects both the painter and his time.