Painter Jean-Michel Basquiat’s star rises yet higher

The reputation of the American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died at 27 in 1988, continues to soar; people are starting now to describe him as "one of the most important painters of the 20th century," an appellation he never received while living. He was a star in life – a protégé of Andy Warhol and Larry Gagosian, a jet-setter who dated models and hung around Jay McInerney-style nightclubs – but has become a superstar in death, and his critical evaluation grows ever more serious. The romance around Basquiat is due to a couple of factors: his vibrant, angry and accessible art, yes, but also the glamour of his life story. He sold his first painting to Debbie Harry; he had parties with "hills of cocaine." And now, there is the insane value of his paintings to absorb. The fact that one of his canvases recently broke a U.S. price record – $110.5-million, sold to a Japanese businessman in May – has increased the frenzy of appreciation.

And his work continues to generate prickly reaction. A big retrospective show, called Boom for Real, has just opened in London, at the massive state Barbican Art Gallery, and it has already provoked an intervention by another famous and wealthy artist. Banksy, the expert graffitist, has defaced the outer walls of the Barbican Centre with some wry commentary of his own. He surreptitiously installed a piece featuring a Basquiat-style figure being frisked by police – perhaps a reference to Basquiat's race and the targeting of young black men by officers. It may be a statement about hypocrisy: Basquiat was denied entrance to fancy restaurants by people who didn't know who he was, and his work is full of the rage of the oppressed. During his life Basquiat's work was often disparaged as being graffiti itself, a kind of pop art unworthy of the highbrow galleries.

There was a certain amount of unconscious racism in these distinctions, and these are now being reconsidered by august institutions. It is worth noting that this exhibition is the first solo show of his in Britain in 20 years. Even in the United States, curators at the big museums have started confessing that they didn't pay him enough attention when he was alive. At the time of the record-breaking auction sale in May, the head curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Ann Temkin, told The New York Times "It's an artist who we missed." (MoMA still doesn't have a single Basquiat painting.)

Another of Banksy's cheeky stencils is an image of a Ferris wheel whose gondolas are Basquiat-style crowns. A stall is charging admission to fairgoers. There is a reference here to the giant London Eye Ferris wheel, a tourist attraction, and another of Banksy's somewhat predictable jabs at commercialization. It's not clear exactly what Banksy's purpose is in mocking this show: Does he think the salute to the dead artist is too late, or that it sanitizes his work, or is he just regretful that living graffiti artists are not given their own massive shows at the Barbican?

Reviews of the show are so far enthusiastic, even fervid: Critics are praising not just the neo-expressionist painting but the multimedia curation. The exhibition includes a wider cultural history, and attempts to paint a picture of New York society at the time of Basquiat's flourishing. It includes films and a recreation of a 1981 group show that Basquiat was in with Robert Mapplethorpe, Nan Goldin, Keith Haring and David Byrne. (See: It's hard to distinguish between critical evaluation and celebrity fun in all this, and that's okay.)

A documentary film about Basquiat's youth was released at the Toronto International Film Festival just this month, also called Boom for Real. (The phrase was apparently Basquiat's way of expressing enthusiasm.) This film is about the late-seventies/ early-eighties New York scene that the artist came from, with primers on hip hop, graffiti and postpunk. The writer-director is Sara Driver, a filmmaker of the same vintage who knew Basquiat and Warhol and the scene that has been now immortalized by a dozen memoirs. Driver was also the producer of her partner Jim Jarmusch's cult movie Stranger Than Paradise, a proudly cool celebration of all things hip and marginal in New York in 1984.

Glamorization of the era is, of course, not new. The first of the hagiographic portrayals of the beautiful young artist was the 1996 Julian Schnabel film Basquiat – a dreamy and mesmerizing film that manages to be about glamour and sadness at the same time. Countless memoirs recall the frenzy of violent/artistic New York. (Among many others one could mention, Rachel Kushner's 2013 novel The Flamethrowers is a particularly gripping fictionalization of aggressive artists of the East Village in the seventies.)

Is this the draw of Basquiat – the idea of boho glamour, of the squats of the East Village, the rise of Grandmaster Flash and the Talking Heads, and the final days of Studio 54? Partly – but I tend to think his recent canonization is about something more significant than mere nostalgia and romanticizing: It reflects a genuine reconsideration of his work, a kind of admission of a former blindness. In 1984 – pace Warhol – it was easier to be exclusive about the definition of art; it was easier to say that Basquiat, exuberant though he was, was more a part of pop culture than high art. Those distinctions were easier to make then. And it was easier to be confident then that the values of the white art establishment – cerebral, cryptic, art-referential, highly conscious of Western art history – would be forever the dominant ones. The elevation of Basquiat is a serious attempt to open up the idea of what makes a canon.