Basquiat retrospective at Brooklyn Museum

The boy could paint. He was a natural original, a high-energy synthesizer/upsetter, with a signature as new and individual as the hybrid of a zebra and an iPod. 'Jean-Michel Basquiat's bristling, ugly-elegant, stream-of-consciousness art looked good in its 1992 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It looks even stronger right now at the Brooklyn Museum. Basquiat's achievement, produced during a truncated but astoundingly prolific career, has the almost too classic prerequisites of greatness: an indelible yet infinitely flexible visual style that cannibalizes and extends the past, reflects its own time and stays fresh and relevant as it moves into the future. His achievement is especially pertinent in a moment when drawing rules the art mediums and graffiti variants are rampant; when figuration and Expressionism are part of the stylistic mix that younger artists take for granted, as they do political attitude; and when language and sound (thanks only partly to video) are as ubiquitous in art as paint on canvas.' Full review.