"This guy basically had his own little, you know, sweatshop of children. It’s insane. I’m still in disbelief."

Said Joel DeBellefeuille, quoted in "Teacher sued over accusations he tried to sell junior high students’ art" (WaPo).

DeBellefeuille brought suit after his 13-year-old son Jax learned that his art teacher was selling merchandise — mugs, cushions, etc. — with his students' art work printed on it.

I don't know if it affects the legal issue, but the assignment had been to do works in the style of Jean-Michel Basquiat. 

Teacher accused of selling students' art without permission https://t.co/OXQbrM6FaC #artgate #quebec #saintlazare #canada

— Joel DeBellefeuille (@DeBellefeuille_) February 13, 2024

Quite aside from the teacher's appropriation of the children's work, what do you think of the original assignment? Note that each image is titled with the student's name plus "Creepy Portrait." Would you like your children required to draw/paint creepy versions of themselves? Shouldn't children be uplifted and encouraged to see themselves in a positive way? Here, the idea is to look at yourself and see sickness, decay, ghoulishness, and despair.

"We don’t have any literature that says he made the painting for Tiffany... But we know a little bit about Basquiat... We know he loved New York, and that he loved luxury and he loved jewelry."

"My guess is that the [blue painting] is not by chance. The color is so specific that it has to be some kind of homage. As you can see, there is zero Tiffany blue in the [ad] campaign other than the painting... It’s a way to modernize Tiffany blue."

Said Alexandre Arnault, a communications vice president at Tiffany, quoted in "Basquiat’s friends ‘horrified’ by Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s Tiffany campaign" (NY Post). 

I was going to quote the expressions of horror by Basquiat's friends, but when I got to Arnault's defense of Tiffany, I saw that those expressions were surplusage. You've heard the phrase "The best defense is a good offense." But sometimes the best offense is a bad defense. Defense is self-serving, so when it works against you, it really works. 

Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a heroin overdose 33 years ago at the age of 27.

But Beyonce and Jay-Z are living well and posing artfully....

It's all so stilted, this "modernization." To my eye, Jay-Z is a tribute to the Maxell blown-away guy of the 1980s...

... and Beyonce is a tribute to John Singer Sargent's "Portrait of Madame X":

Not too "modern." 

Then again I could be wrong in my mental associations. At least they are — unlike Arnault's idea that Basquiat mixed that color blue to say "Tiffany!" — unaffected by commercial interests.

"Some collectors questioned the idea of owning art without exclusivity. 'Why pay $69 million for something anyone can see online?'"

"... said Peter Kraus, chairman and chief executive of Aperture Investors, a New York advisory firm, who collects with his wife, Jill, a trustee at the Museum of Modern Art. Their acquisitions include one of six existing versions of 'The Clock,' Christian Marclay’s 24-hour-long video collage showing thousands of clips from movies throughout history. 'Scarcity is worth something; it’s about owning something that you think is beautiful and can’t be seen in anybody else’s house,' Kraus added. 'There has to be some clarity around what it is that you are owning as a collector.'" 

From "As Auctioneers and Artists Rush Into NFTs, Many Collectors Stay Away/Auction sales show a schism in the market: speculative buyers flock to crypto art while blue-chip collectors hold back, fearing legal gray areas and copyright issues" by Zachary Small (NYT). 

The NYT put a link on "The Clock," but it did not go to the full "24-hour-long video collage," only to a short video with where we hear from Siri Engberg, the senior curator of visual arts at the Walker Center in Minneapolis.

She seems weirdly lit up — those eyes! — and asserts: "Marklay has brilliantly wove together clips to give us this sense of artificial cinematic time." Yes, "has... wove together."  Somehow that solecism makes me feel that Engberg isn't really thinking the thoughts that go with the words coming out of her mouth. 

What Markley has done is take movie clips showing clocks and watches and displayed them so that if you start his montage at the right time, the time displayed in his video is — for the whole 24 hours — the time it really is in your time zone. 

Did you notice that I used the word "montage" and the NYT wrote "video collage"? That sets off my bullshit detector. The NYT write has got to know the word "montage." The only reason to say "video collage" instead is if you're stretching to make Marklay seem like an important visual artist and hoping to distract us from thinking about all the people who labor in conventional film editing. And by conventional, I mean they make films people will watch through to the end.

Kraus, the investor adviser quoted in the beginning of this post, questioned buying NFTs when anybody can look at this art on line, but the funny thing about "The Clock" is that no one will watch 24 hours of showing watches and clocks. Hearing the idea alone is enough to get the concept. The 2-minute video I've embedded is probably more than anyone needs to sit through. So how could there possibly be someone who will pay $69 million for the NFT of it?

The question answers itself! Owning the NFT isn't about looking at the art. It's about owning a unique token of the art. You're not so much owning art — like some aged plutocrat with paintings on his wall — as you are owning ownership. It's a perfect celebration of nothing. 

FROM THE EMAIL: A reader named Kay sends me a link to this: "In a horrifying, Orwellian plot twist, the upcoming auction for an NFT of a drawing by Jean-Michel Basquiat will allow the winner to destroy the original artwork." I regard this as a publicity stunt, nothing that will ever happen, but, as they say, when you talk about destruction, you can count me out.

Jean-Michel Basquiat is "now in the same league as Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso."

The crowd gasped as his painting of a skull just sold for $110.5 million.

The $495 million art auction — "a new era in the art market."

"The sale included works by Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The sale established 16 new world auction records, with nine works selling for more than $10m (£6.6m) and 23 for more than $5m (£3.2m)."

These works really are valuable, because they are the last great works in the history of painting — if we are to understand the history of painting as the era when people paid attention to and cared about what painters were painting.

Grotesque faces are highly favored by the very rich.

Click here to see the paintings that brought the highest prices.

A 1967 portrait ["Study for Head of George Dyer,"] by Francis Bacon fetched $27.4 million at Sotheby's here on Tuesday night...

... "Untitled (Pecho/Oreja)," a 1982-83 painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat... acquired by members of the band U2 in 1989... sold for $10.1 million....

I'm not knocking these paintings, by the way, just noting that both depict grotesque faces and finding it interesting that people with lots of money enjoy ugliness. I'm always jealous of successful painters — and I painted many grotesque faces in my failed-artist days. Reading articles like this one, I have to fight back the delusion that those millions should be mine.