Japan Has Shitty Billionaires

Yusaku Maezawa started an online clothing business in Japan at twenty-three. Within a decade he was a billionaire and spending his money on shitty imprint t-shirts and super expensive paintings. Last week he paid $110 million at auction for an untitled painting by black revolutionary expressionist painter, Jean-Michel Basquiat. It was a skull. Always a skull.

Basquiat was the absolute darling of old rich white women in the New York art scene of the 1980’s. A Haitian-Puerto Rican high school dropout graffiti artist with angry racial themes and not obviously good art made for the perfect orgasm. Literally, he fucked many of those biddies. They wrote him fat checks. This isn’t prostitution. This is aesthetics you’ll never understand. Times Square was very different back then.

In the prime of his rapid rise in the art world, Basquiat pounded a death level amount of heroin at twenty-seven. He was in every sense a rock star. Basquiat’s graffiti artist partner from the 70’s called this highest priced painting ever sold by an American artists “not one of Basquiat’s better works”. Go figure. The dude who wrote the screenplay for the Basquiat bio-pic had more effusive and globally significant praise for the artist:

“Basquiat’s work is equal part spiritual gift and revolutionary weapon. This should be a moment of great pride and admiration, for what Basquiat has done. Through his art (and specifically through the spectacular sale of ‘Untitled’) Basquiat has shown the world our genius, our value, our suffering, and our power, all in one stroke. There is no price that can represent that. Art is something much greater than anything material: it is a literal reflection of the human soul that created it.”

Meh, still not worth $110 million. That’s a lot of house. Basquiat painted this untitled work thirty-five years ago and not much has changed for Haitian-Puerto Ricans in New York. Teaching art at one of the local shitty schools would’ve been more helpful. Japanese e-tail billionaires are probably less interested in fixing the schools along Flatbush than they are collecting pieces to show their schoolgirl cosplay concubines.

There’s a ton of stereotyping in this article. All of it spot on.