funny weather

“It is necessary to make an imaginative effort which runs contrary to the whole contemporary trend of the art world: it is necessary to see works of art freed from all the mystique which is attached to them as property objects. It then becomes possible to see them as testimony to the process of their own making instead of as products; to see them in terms of action instead of finished achievement. The question: what went into the making of this? supersedes the collector’s question of: what is this?”

“How could I ever catch up (by which I mean, how could you want me?)”

“Desire could be his subject; he could make what he described as ‘propaganda’ for queer love.”

“The heterosexuality of every day life enveloped and asphyxiated me. I numbed myself to this life - something which all gay men and women do even if they bury the hurt of it.”

“The pen couldn’t kill, but it could reveal the dysfunction of foundational myths. Over and over, he redrafted American history, the ongoing brutalizing dynamic of racism and its long legacies.”

“…painted in the heroin wasteland of 1988, Basquiat’s last year, in which a black man rides on a four-legged white skeleton, against an awesomely reduced background, a burlap-colored scrim, of absolutely nothing at all.”