The sales included plenty of guarantees and several works by artists whose momentum has cooled amid higher interest rates, ongoing geopolitical conflict, and concerns over the upcoming US national election.

While Phillips’ spring evening sale in Hong Kong had only 24 lots, the auction house managed to ride the ongoing wave of demand for Jean-Michel Basquiat by selling Native Carrying Some Guns, Bibles, Amorites on Safari for HK$99 million or U$12.6 million, the highest amount for the season across all the auction houses and categories in Hong Kong. The work carried an estimate of HK$90 million to HK$120 million.

Phillips was also the only auction house to consign a work by Banksy. The popular street artist was absent from this past New York spring auction season but The Leopard and Lamb sold at Phillips Hong Kong on May 31 for HK$36.8 million or $4.7 million on an estimate of HK$18 million to $28 million.

Phillips said its Modern and Contemporary art spring sales in Hong were 22 percent higher compared to last season, with works by Zao Wou-Ki, Yoshitomo Nara, Yayoi Kusama, and Andy Warhol accounting for six out of the top ten lots.

Christie’s said in a press release that its Asia Spring auctions on May 28 and 29 generated a total of HK$963 million ($124 million), with “close to 90% sold by lot and by value and over 40% of lots sold over high estimate.” However, last year Christie’s spring auctions in Hong Kong generated HK$1.24 billion ($159 million), indicating a drop of 22 percent in sales including fees.

Other declines included the number of works which sold for above HK$10 million ($1.3 million) compared to last year (22 for 2024, versus 36 for 2023). There were also fewer lots (81 in 2024; 88 in 2023) in this year’s 20th and 21st Century evening sales compared to the 20th/21st Century and Post-Millennium evening sales, as well as more works that did not sell (14 in 2024; 12 in 2023).

A bright yellow acrylic and silkscreen Flowers painting from 1965 by Andy Warhol was the top lot, at HK$66.625 million with fees ($8.5million USD), on an estimate of (HK $62.8 million – HK $92.8 million). Other top sellers included Zao Wou-Ki’s 10.01.68 for HK $63.175 million, or approximately $8.13 million (estimate of HK$68 million to HK$ 98 million), Yayoi Kusama’s 83-inch tall sculpture Pumpkin (2012) for HK $48.775 million, or $6.28 million (estimate of HK$40 million to HK$60 million), and Rene Magritte’s 1944 painting of a rose L’Invitation au voyage for HK $42.725 million or just under $5.5 million (estimate of HK$28 million to HK$38 million).

Eight of the top ten lots across Christie’s four sales on May 28 and May 29 had guarantees, with the exception of Yoshitomo Nara’s Portrait of AE (2009) and Rock You! (2006).

It’s worth noting that Paul Cezanne’s La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue des Lauves (circa 1902-1906) sold for HK$22.16 million or $4.5 million, on an estimate of HK$20 million to HK$30 million. That figure was a drop from when the consignor purchased the work in June 2014 from Christie’s in London for £3.55 million or about $6 million.

The selling price for Zao Wou-Ki’s 10.01.68 was also lower than when it previously appeared at auction at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in November 2018, when it sold for HK$68.9 million or $8.8 million, as the lead lot for a sale of Abstract artworks in the house’s Brushwork series.

Breakout results included a Salvo for HK$3.2 million (estimate HK$1 million to HK$1.5 million), a Marina Perez Simao painting for HK$2.1 million (estimate of HK$700,000 to HK$1.2 million), and a Ben Sledsen work for HK$1.6 million (estimate of HK$200,000 to HK$400,000). Works by Michaela Yearwood-Dan, Miriam Cahn, Lee Bae, Xia Yu, Katherine Bernhardt, and Sholto Blissett also sold above high estimates.

Christie’s said world auctions records were also set for Rhee Seundja, Nguyen Tu Nghiem, Skygolpe, Ay-o, Sholto Blissett, Jeong Young-do, Son Dong-Hyun, Daniel Correa Mejia, Jeon Hyun-Sun and Kim Su-Yeon.

Notably, two works by Nicholas Party did not sell (one had an estimate of HK$22 million to HK$28 million, or $2.8 million to $3.6 million), as well as a Wayne Thiebaud (estimate of HK$30 million to HK$40 million, or $3.8 million to $5.1 million), which had the third highest estimate of the house’s 21st Century sale.

Christie’s also officially announced at the end of its sales that it would hold its inaugural auctions at its new Asia Pacific headquarters at The Henderson building in Central district on September 26 and September 27, starting with sales of 20th and 21st Century art.

That record follows the sale of Basquiat’s Untitled (ELMAR), also from 1982, at Phillips’s modern and contemporary art evening sale in New York earlier this month for $46.5 million. That work was the most expensive lot of the New York sales.

“These outstanding results confirm our unwavering dedication to Basquiat’s legacy and truly showed all of which we are capable,” Meiling Lee, Phillips’s head of modern and contemporary art in Asia, said in a press release. 

This spring, Phillips sold three early works by Basquiat. Untitled (Portrait of a Famous Ballplayer), from 1981, also sold at Phillips’s modern and contemporary art evening sale, bringing in $7.8 million. 

The Hong Kong sale brought in a total of $26.8 million with a sell-through rate of 96 percent, a 10 percent increase from the previous season, the house said. 

Additional highlights from the sale were Banksy’s Leopard and Lamb (2016), which sold for $4.7 million; Yayoi Kusama’s INFINITY NETS (ZGHEB) from 2007, which sold for $3.3 million; and another Kusama, Pumpkin (2000), which brought in $1.7 million.

The house lowered the lights so as to showcase a glowing Felix Gonzalez-Torres light bulb sculpture that glowed as it hung in the room. It was just one of a number of dramatic moments in a night of mixed results for the house.

On the upside, records were set for Diane Arbus, Gonzalez-Torres, Reggie Burrows Hodges, Ana Mendieta, and Martin Wong. On the downside, the sale was uneven, acting as further evidence of a contracting art market that has coincided with elevated interest rates and a “permacrisis” partly resulting from two ongoing military conflicts abroad.

Christie’s held two sales on Tuesday night, one devoted to the holdings of Miami collectors Carlos and Rosa de la Cruz, the other to contemporary art more broadly. These auctions followed two contemporary art sales at Sotheby’s the night before that scored $267.3 million, squarely in the middle of the pre-sale estimate range of $241.8 million to $350.4 million. The Sotheby’s sales represented a slow start to a week of auctions estimated to bring in around $1 billion between auctions held by that house, Christie’s, and Phillips.

The de la Cruz sale is the only major evening auction in New York this week that includes a large body of works from a single owner or an estate, which tends to lend appeal and boost totals. But some of the excitement surrounding the auction was overshadowed by a crisis at Christie’s. On Thursday, the house’s website went down due to what it called a “technology security issue.” Even as the sale took place, the site was still not online.

“You might have to ‘kick it old school’ and actually show up to bid and preview the lots,” said New York art adviser Ralph De Luca, adding, “I think the temperature of the current secondary market could make it possible to acquire works that are very hard to get in the primary market for as close to primary price as possible (and maybe even below).” That result was borne out.

New York art adviser Erica Barrish also had tips before the sale: “I think if you’re a savvy buyer, this is when you start buying postwar. It’s tried and true, and there’s a patina and a resonance.” 

In the end, the consensus was that the hack was annoying but not insurmountable. All went basically to plan in terms of technology.

The night’s highest-estimated lot—Brice Marden’s Event (2004–7), tagged at up to $50 million—did not go to plan, however. The work was guaranteed to sell by Christie’s, but the house withdrew it at the last minute and thus now owns the canvas, which was expected to surpass Marden’s existing record, $30.9 million, fetched by the painting Complements (2004–7) at Christie’s in 2020. The artist died at age 84 last year. While the house didn’t name the seller, who has owned the work since it left Marden’s studio, Artnet News reported that it was “reclusive collector Richard Schlagman.” The work had never been seen in public.

“The choice to withdraw the Marden was ours,” said Christie’s specialist Alex Rotter after the sale. “It wasn’t Brice’s evening, and we’re not willing to jeopardize the market of an artist like that.”

In addition to the Marden, three other works were withdrawn. A Martin Kippenberger estimated at up to $3 million was removed from the de la Cruz sale; a Nicolas Party priced at up to $3 million and a Robert Mangold with a $1 million high estimate were removed from the 21st-century sale.

The evening opened with the 45-minute sale of 26 lots from the more than 1,000-work holdings of the late Miami collector and philanthropist Rosa de la Cruz (who collected with her husband, Carlos, and was an ARTnews Top 200 collector). The sale brought a hammer total of $28.1 million against an estimate from $25 million to $37 million. Eight works—almost a third of them—were priced at $1 million or above. Bidding was very lively both in the room and on the phone, with clients bidding via specialists. Every work was guaranteed to sell, 17 of them by third parties. 

“Of course the most talked about consignor is the liquidation of the de la Cruz Foundation,” said De Luca in an email, “which sadly reinstates that foundations ARE NOT museums and should not be given access to primary works like they are.” The de la Cruzes were often on the receiving end of major discounts from dealers.

Though the sale included contemporary artists like Peter Doig and Glenn Ligon, the priciest of the bunch was an iconic Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (America #3), which hammered at $11.5 million on an estimate of $8 million–$12 million, ably surpassing his previous record of $7.7 million. The work had featured in a major exhibition of the artist at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1995. It sold to Japan’s Pola Museum. 

Three works by Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta were highly anticipated. The sculpture Untitled (Sandwoman Series / Serie Mujer de Arena), 1983, estimated at up to $500,000, was set to eclipse her record of about $200,000, notched in 2008 at Phillips. The floor sculpture shows the stylized outline of her own body in sand and earth. It hammered at $450,000 to a client bidding by phone via a specialist for a total of $567,000 with the house’s fees.

Some 23 of the 25 de la Cruz works sold within or in excess of their estimates.

During a brief break before the 21st-century sale, one adviser, speaking anonymously, called the de la Cruz results “depressing” despite the deep bidding, saying that the family had plainly priced the works to move. 

The 21st century sale’s low estimate of $104 million was 5 percent higher than in 2023, and the sale had 30 percent more works than the same sale last year.

The top lot from the 21st-century sale was a painting by market titan Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Italian Version of Popeye has no Pork in his Diet (1982), estimated at around $30 million. In contrast to the lively bidding in other sections of the sale, the room went deadly still when auctioneer Georgina Hilton opened the bidding at $24 million. It reached a hammer price of $27.5 million after the auctioneer tried to eke bids out of phone specialists left and right. In one of the night’s more colorful moments, a would-be bidder stopped her from bringing down the hammer by bellowing “Hold on!” before walking out of the room while talking on the phone, calling out “One second!,” then ultimately withdrawing from the contest. With the house’s fees, the work went for $32 million. 

Measuring 5 feet square, this is one of Basquiat’s distinctive stretcher-bar paintings, in which the canvas is roughly stretched and tied over protruding wood supports made from found objects; other examples hang in the Menil Collection in Houston and the Whitney Museum, among other institutions. It includes much of his trademark imagery: the crown, the copyright symbol, and crossed-out words, along with a bug-eyed face. It passed through the hands of three prominent New York dealers early on—Larry Gagosian, Sidney Janis, and Annina Nosei—before disappearing into private hands. It was shown in Basquiat’s posthumous 1992 Whitney Museum retrospective but then went in public for nearly 20 years; Artnet reports that it comes from the collection of financier Andy Stone of Petra Capital Management.

With the house’s fees, the 21st-century sale totaled $80.3 million, with 94 percent of lots offered finding buyers and 90 percent of the works selling within or above estimate.

“I can’t remember a more challenging week than this week,” CEO Guillaume Cerutti told the press after the sale, referring to the website problems. “We had to deal with this in one of the most important weeks for us. I’m extremely proud of this team and what we have done.

“Did we see situations where clients were asking to withdraw lots because of the situation? No,” he continued, “None of the withdrawals were linked to the incident. Our clients understand that we are able to deliver despite the incident. And that’s what we did. And I can tell you, the best is still to come this week.” 

Of the 30 lots that headed to sale, two ended up being withdrawn. One of those was a $12 million Picasso painting, one of the most expensive lots that was to be sold by Phillips this week.

The priciest lot was Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (ELMAR), from 1982, one of 13 lots that hit the block with a third-party guarantee. Phillips gave the painting a $60 million high estimate, putting it on track to become one of the most expensive Basquiat paintings ever sold at auction. That number was in part a reflection of its decorated provenance: it had been acquired from dealer Annina Nosei by anthropologist Francesco Pellizzi, a friend of Basquiat. Pellizzi then sold it to the current consignor.

Untitled (ELMAR) didn’t come close to that $60 million figure, ultimately hammering for just a hair above its low estimate, at $40.2 million. Even if that wasn’t an astounding number, it was good enough for people in the room, who greeted the sale with a round of applause. With fees, the final result was $46.5 million. (All sales listed here include buyer’s premium, unless noted otherwise.)

The action at this sale was slow, with few bidding wars. Most works sold for within their estimates. There was just one record set, for the painter Kent Monkman, and there were few surprises. On the whole, the Phillips auction was largely free of drama—which is perhaps the best thing the house could ask for, given that anxiety about a market slowdown has been pervasive. (Plus, Phillips has something one of its competitors does not: a working website. As Christie’s headed into its marquee sales this evening, its site remained offline following a cyberattack.)

Barkley L. Hendricks’s 1977 painting Vendetta, featuring a woman wearing a tank top emblazoned with the word “bitch,” was among the most closely watched lots ahead of tonight’s sale. The painting had come to auction from Richard D. Segal, a Whitney Museum trustee, and had been given a $3.5 million high estimate.

Hendricks’s $8.4 million record was set this past November at Sotheby’s in New York, and Vendetta didn’t eclipse that benchmark. This painting sold for $3.2 million—a respectable sum that put it within the house’s estimate, but one which may not have quite tracked with pre-sale anticipation.

Another buzzy lot was Untitled (Boy with Glasses), a 2010 painting by the late Noah Davis, whose art has gained some market momentum on the auction block in recent years. That energy has coincided with institutional attention for him: today brought the announcement that Davis will have a retrospective opening at collector Hasso Plattner’s Das Minsk museum in Potsdam, Germany, before the show travels in 2025 to London’s Barbican Centre and Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum.

Aryn Drake-Lee, the ex-wife of actor Jesse Williams, had consigned the piece to auction, where it came with a $200,000 high estimate. The painting, which is based on a photograph of the rapper Lil John, ended up outpacing that figure, selling for $279,400. That’s a good outcome, albeit one that can’t quite match the frenzy that surrounded a Davis painting at Phillips’s New York auction last May, when a canvas by Davis sold for $990,600, more than nine times its $100,000 estimate. (The artist’s auction record stands at $1.5 million, set at Christie’s in 2022.)

Helen Frankenthaler’s Acres (1959), a soak-and-stain painting from this Abstract Expressionist’s heyday, was one of the few works that managed to incite a bona fide battle. Over the course of several minutes, two phone bidders duked it out, pushing the work far beyond its $2.5 million high estimate. In the end, it sold for $3.69 million—hardly a record for Frankenthaler, whose most expensive work at auction sold for $7.8 million at an online Sotheby’s sale in 2021, but a good result no less.

But the Frankenthaler was an exception during an auction in which buyers seemed cautious about bidding on work by established artists. A $5 million painting by Frank Stella, who died earlier this month, failed to sell altogether. Likewise works by Pierre Bonnard and Robert Mangold.

When it came to less established artists at auction, the young painter Jadé Fadojutimi continued to shine. The Pour (2022), a purplish abstraction, made its way to Phillips just two years after it was purchased by the consignor from London’s Pippy Houldsworth Gallery. It shot beyond its $600,000 high estimate, selling for $1.08 million. Derek Fordjour’s painting Numbers (2018) also performed well, going for $889,000 on a $600,000 high estimate.

One star faltered: María Berrío, whose 2015 portrait The Lovers 2, depicting a woman whose face is hidden beneath a feathered veil, returned to Phillips tonight, less than two years after it sold for $1 million at a Hong Kong auction. On Tuesday, it came to auction with a $350,000 high estimate—and failed to find a buyer.

Following the hour-long auction’s conclusion, some said it was tough to speak in grand pronouncements about the results. “We’re seeing a mixed, artist-specific market at Phillips tonight,” art adviser David Shapiro told ARTnews. But he said there were some positives: the sell-through rate was 92 percent, which he noted was solid, “notwithstanding some tepid results.”

Karen K. Ho contributed reporting.

The students attended Westwood Junior High School in the Quebec suburb of Saint-Lazare. The lawsuit, filed in Quebec Superior Court on March 22, seeks $1.58 million, or $155,000 for each of the 10 students, plus punitive damages, against former instructor Mario Perron and Lester B. Pearson School Board on the allegations of copyright infringement.

The lawsuit states that in January, Perron assigned his 96 students to draw themselves or a classmate a portrait inspired by the style of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. The project was titled “Creepy Portrait.” After students turned in the assignment in February, they found images of their “Creepy Portraits” being sold on Perron’s website. According to CBC News, some items were priced as high as $174.

The parents represented by the lawsuit also want a written apology from Perron, the removal of the students’ artwork from all websites, and a report of any sales made from the “Creepy Portrait” images. 

One parent represented in the lawsuit said that the experience reduced her daughter’s interest in art and turned her off of the idea of becoming an artist.

“My daughter loves art, always has been into art, and this year after everything happened, she said to me, ‘I don’t think I’ll do art next year,'” Edith Liard told CBC News. “I was surprised because she’s always been artsy at home before school, and she actually picked Westwood because of their art program.”

Another parent represented in the lawsuit, Joel DeBellefeuille, said the amount of money being sought represented the scale of student works listed for sale on t-shirts, mugs, and other merchandise online.

“We requested $5,000 per artwork that was infringed,” DeBellefeuille told CBC News, noting there were 31 pieces of plagiarized merchandise per student. 

Under Canada’s Copyright Act, statutory damages for infringements of a commercial nature range from $500 to $20,000 per work.

They surveyed the 30 or so Basquiat art works in relative peace ,before the throng arrived.

Cohen tells me he came straight from writing something “for TV” that might shoot in Los Angeles or in London, he wasn’t sure. Interesting.

There may also be a film. But before anything else he’ll be seen along with Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Lesley Manville and Louis Partridge in Disclaimer, the TV drama thriller Alfonso Cuarón has written and directed for Apple TV+.

Rock and Cohen had skedaddled with pal Guy Oseary to see Madonna by the time Oscar nominee Jeffrey Wright presented himself at the gallery. It was wholly appropriate that the American Fiction star be there. Some 28 years ago, Wright portrayed the artist in Julian Schnabel’s biopic Basquiat. The actor fist-bumped me but wasn’t overly keen on dragging up memories of playing the renowned painter who died in 1988.

I was taken by guests who brought their pooches to the show.

Sylvia Ades over from New York cradled Daisy her maltipoo as she studied Basquiat’s works.

Ades revealed that Basquiat’s Luna Park, 1983, an acrylic and oil stick on canvas, is from her private collection and that she agreed to loan it to the exhibition co-curated by Gagosian and Fred Hoffman, who had been a close friend and collaborator of Basquiat’s.

“I’m getting it back,” Ades joked.

I trooped off to the upper gallery space to study Luna Park and was stunned by it’s coherent ambition and its size. “It’s big, isn’t it ?” Ades agreed.

Another dog lover was Alex Brookhart who was there with Kenny and described as an “LA mutt.”

I was impressed at how well behaved the canines were and felt guilty that my two boys back in the UK don’t get taken to art galleries, but then they have paintings, books and films to enjoy plus they do get walked to exhibitions in green spaces close to our home in east London.

Melanie Griffith and Jane Fonda wandered in and out. Filmmaker Bennett Miller drifted by. He had his own show at the Gagosian in January and has other artworks planned. He tells me that he’s just signed with a writer to collaborate on a movie project that he’ll direct. “It’s early days,” he cautioned.

Rustin executive producer David Permut was in attendance with his fashion executive niece Becca Mines. She’s COO of Rentrayge and was wearing a jacket created by the label.

Permut says he was elated by President Biden’s State of the Union speech. ”It’s what we needed to hear.”

Last week he was at the White House with director George C. Wolfe to screen their film for the First Lady.

My old actor friend Jimmy Jean-Louis was moved by Basquiat’s work. “It gives you a boost to see such magnificence,” he says.

Jean-Louis is headed for a tour of India with the composer A.R. Rahman and a film they both worked on with writer and director Blessy called The Goat Life.

Later some of us scooted over to Steak 48 for dinner. I confess to being addicted to their freshly prepared beignets, which are presented dangling from silver branches. I wanted to resist them but failed, badly.

D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai On ‘Killers of the Flower Moon‘

Reservation Dogs star D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai was telling me at the Green Carpet Fashion Awards the other night the importance of having Lily Gladstone speak “our native language on stage, on television.”

The Canadian-born Oji-Cree spoke passionately about how “our traditional dances, our ceremonies, our religious rites, our women, our regalia and our language were taken away from us,” as he showered the Killers of the Flower Moon Best Actress Oscar nominee with praise.

Indigenous children were put into residential homes in the 19th century “and those homes were kept going for over a hundred years,” where children “were beaten” until they forgot their language, he says.

Ever since Killers of the Flower Moon premiered at Cannes, I’ve read tomes on how North America’s indigenous people had their culture ripped from them so they could be forced to assimilate.

Woon-A-Tai tugged at his hair and explained that kids at those homes had their hair chopped off. ”That’s the reason why native men grow out their hair and keep it long… we believe our hair is our strength and guidance from our ancestors.”

He says Martin Scorsese’s film has been so vital for native Americans because it encourages “the young to learn their language and be fluent in it. Learn your traditional language and heritage,” he implores.

“Killers of the Flower Moon has been this huge moment because native language was spoken not just by Lily Gladstone but by Robert De Niro, that’s huge. The impact the film has had is enormous.”

The actor, who was at the Green Carpet Fashion Awards with his girlfriend Quannah Chasinghorse, the model and actress who served as a co-chair of the event.

He longs for the day when more native writers and directors “will allow me to speak my language” in future projects.

Woon-A-Tai also observed that the performance of the Osage Nation song Wahzhazhe (A Song For My People) at the Oscar ceremony on Sunday is also a significant moment. The song will be performed by members of the Osage tribe.

“It’s going to be a big moment,” says the actor who mingled with other guests at the sustainable 1 Hotel on Sunset Boulevard. They included Zendaya, Annie Lennox, Helen Hunt, Amber Valletta, former president of Ireland Mary Robinson, Trudie Styler and marvellous Livia Firth who founded the GCFA.

The SXSW-bound indie, which stars Sonequa Martin-Green, Natalie Morales, Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman, marks Kelce’s first foray into movies, with the Kansas City Chiefs tight end serving as an executive producer. The investors in the low-budget dark comedy, which include Kelce, are the first to take advantage of 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act to finance a film. (My Dead Friend Zoe cost less than $10 million.)

The Inflation Reduction Act, which was passed in August 2022, marks “the single largest investment in climate and energy in American history, enabling America to tackle the climate crisis, advancing environmental justice, securing America’s position as a world leader in domestic clean energy manufacturing and putting the United States on a pathway to achieving the Biden-Harris Administration’s climate goals, including a net-zero economy by 2050,” according to the US Department of Energy’s website. My Dead Friend Zoe used money generated by green energy entrepreneur Mike Field’s sale of surplus tax credits. (Field is also a producer on the film.)

“Hollywood is risky, right? On a scale of one to 10, Hollywood, it is a 9.5. Especially in terms of independent film,” says My Dead Friend Zoe producer Ray Maiello, who runs California-based Radiant Media Studios with Field and is the former head of business affairs at Netflix. “These federal tax credits take the risk down to like a five.”

Kelce, Maiello, and Field are using the same strategy to finance a second film, the Jean-Michel Basquiat documentary King Pleasure. The Boardwalk Pictures film is helmed by Quinn Wilson, the former creative director for Lizzo, and is being made with the cooperation of the late artist’s estate. Kelce, Maiello, and Field could spark a trend in Hollywood of employing the Inflation Reduction Act as a way to raise funds and bolster the flagging indie film sector. These types of deals have become common outside Hollywood and now represent a market worth between $7 billion and $9 billion.

“[Field] and I wanted to branch out and we’ve been talking about [expanding] for years. And then Biden really incentivized it,” Maiello adds. “Biden saw that people can’t plan what their tax liabilities are going to be. People don’t want to take risks. And so he really opened it up with these federal tax credits and we’re combining that with Hollywood. That’s the idea.”

Directed by Kyle Hausmann-Stokes, My Dead Friend Zoe follows a female Afghanistan veteran who comes head-to-head with her Vietnam vet grandfather at the family’s ancestral lake house. The film, which will make its world premiere at SXSW on March 9, was produced by Legion M and is being sold by CAA.

Though Kelce has already indicated that he will be returning for the 2024-25 NFL season to join the Chiefs effort to possibly three-peat as Super Bowl champions, he is making inroads now into Hollywood, in a similar vein as Tom Brady, who recently played himself in the hit comedy 80 for Brady and has been producing as well. Kelce is repped by CAA.

You can buy a Uniqlo baseball hat with his “radiant baby” image ($29.90), a chess set from the MoMA Design Store whose pieces are all barking dogs and breakdancing figures ($55), high-top sneakers from Zara covered in Haring’s thick black lines ($25.99; on sale at the time of writing), and lounge pants from Urban Outfitters adorned with people with flowering heads ($45).

You can buy skateboards, stickers, and pins, all dotted with the same images that appear in Haring’s paintings. And from the design store at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, you can even buy a Haring candle in a container with zigzagging stick figures all over it ($88). Per its description, when burned, the candle smells like lily of the valley, with notes of jasmine, peony, and musk.

There are few artists whose signature style has been so widely, unashamedly capitalized by big brands (with the help of estates and foundations). But in some ways, the condition is hardly new—Haring himself sold magnets, buttons, garments, coloring books, and skateboards at his very own Pop Shop, which launched in New York; for a time, he also ran a Tokyo outpost. The Japanese store became a problem when copycats began peddling shirts like his; it closed when the knockoffs became too tough to control, rendering Haring’s business obsolete. Money matters, after all.

The Pop Shop’s facade was spray-painted with the word CAPITALIST when it opened in New York in 1986—not that that necessarily kept members of the art world from flocking to it. Some observers were even more abrasive than the Pop Shop’s vandal. Writing in Spy magazine, journalist Tad Friend claimed that Haring’s art had reached a dead end with the Pop Shop, writing, “what precipitated Haring’s eclipse was not so much the suspicion that he had prostituted his art, but that he had nothing to prostitute.”

But was Haring really a sellout? This is the question that the writer Brad Gooch bandies about in his new Haring biography, Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring (Harper), which makes the case that Haring’s art was conceptualism masquerading as capitalism.

The Haring we know is a graffiti artist-turned-art world superstar. Having made his name scrawling cryptic creatures on the walls of the New York subway system (and occasionally drawing legal penalties for doing so), he would within a decade end up exhibiting these inventions in paintings that sold for vast sums in blue-chip European galleries. It was a tough balancing act for Haring, who once retorted, “I don’t know what they intended me to do: Just stay in the subway the rest of my life? Somehow that would have made me pure?”

Well, would it have? Gooch invests himself in rebutting the notion that Haring was impure simply because he profited from his art. He quotes KAWS, an artist known for selling his own array of collectibles: “It almost seems like a natural thing these days to be an artist and make products.” The implication is that Haring simply opened the door for others to follow. And in the book’s final chapter, Gooch approvingly quotes American actor and filmmaker Dennis Hopper’s eulogy for Haring, given at his funeral in 1990, the year Haring died of AIDS-related causes at the tender age of 31. Hopper credited Haring with “bringing back the ideals of conceptual art” by spinning the stuff of the everyday into works galleries could show and sell.

And sell, they did. Haring came of artistic maturity in the ’80s New York scene, a milieu that was suddenly flush with money as the art market rapidly expanded. (He got his start in the more hardscrabble and less monied East Village, and then graduated beyond it.) Haring, as Gooch reports, had at the start of the decade vowed never to sell a painting for more than $10,000. By the end of his life, one of his paintings sold at an AIDS charity auction for seven times that figure.

In Radiant, the painter George Condo, who befriended Haring, recalls that, at one point in his career, Haring consciously decided to “change his ways from being relatively humble to exploiting the potential of what you can do when you make a few bucks as an artist.” Gooch seems to ask if you can blame him.

The desire to make money always lay dormant within Haring. Born in 1958 in Reading, Pennsylvania, Haring was raised in the unassuming suburb of Kutztown; his family’s home exuded a “middle-class respectability,” according to one local publication. Haring had the ambition to exceed that town. “When I grow up,” a fourth-grade Haring wrote, “I would like to be an artist in France. The reason is because I like to draw. I would get my money from the pictures I would sell. I hope I will be one.”

His early reference to financial fortune seems telling: not every aspiring artist dreams of a creative lifestyle and a healthy cash flow. But during the 1970s, when he attended a Pennsylvania art school with a focus on work made to suit commercial purposes, he came to the realization that he “wasn’t going to be a commercial artist.” He just didn’t have the chops for it, he thought. Little did he know.

By the time he came to New York to study at the School of Visual Arts in 1978, he was working in what Gooch describes as an “Alechinsky-meets-Dubuffet manner,” a reference to Pierre Alechinsky and Jean Dubuffet, two European avant-gardists. These painters worked in a faux naive style that deliberately appeared sloppy and loose, like a child’s approach to a grade-school art assignment. Gooch digs into the influence Haring drew from both, in particular Dubuffet for his “sympathy for the influences of Eastern art, especially calligraphy, in which drawing is a kind of writing and writing a kind of drawing.” If you follow Gooch’s logic, no sellout would fall so hard for art that so vastly differed from what Westerners want. Perhaps for that reason, Haring’s stardom did not arrive overnight.

Gooch’s descriptions of Haring’s poverty during this era are evocative. He writes of one of Haring’s early living spaces, an East Village residence that was actually part of a “lady’s apartment subdivided into small, unattractive rooms she leased mostly to much older men, one of whom died while Haring was living there, with everyone sharing a kitchen and bathroom.” It was certainly nothing like his final apartment, “a duplex penthouse in a six-story condominium building with ten raw loft spaces.” Haring paid $600,000 for that residence.

Yet while he initially hustled to make ends meet, he also found he didn’t have to suffer forever. During the early ’80s, Haring helped organize art exhibitions for the Mudd Club, a chic boîte in the East Village, but as he grew increasingly skeptical of management there, he parted ways and started selling his drawings himself. “I realized I could probably start living from my work,” Haring said. “I also realized I didn’t ever have to do menial work again. And so, I quit.” Later, he would work with dealer Tony Shafrazi, who priced his paintings at $30,000 a pop.

In the ensuing several hundred pages, Gooch charts Haring’s social rise, pointing out the time that he consulted Andy Warhol for business advice and the times he hung out with Madonna. Gooch adopts a defensive posture regarding Haring’s fame, writing that he was “unaware that he was as famous as some of the celebrities he was eager to catch a glimpse of or speak with.” This seems sort of hard to believe, given that Haring put so much work into cultivating a friendship with Warhol and even leaned heavily on the Pop artist’s own social network for clout. (Warhol, for his part, was impressed by some but not all of Haring’s art. Of the Pop Shop, Warhol disparagingly wrote in his diary, “So I guess he is a little like Peter Max.”)

For Haring, fame was twinned with fortune, and the confluence of the two blinded him to the realities of those he kept close. Radiant does not elide descriptions of behavior by Haring that now seem queasy at best and racist at worse.

His Pop Shop was staffed mainly by “cute, young Latin boys,” as one of Haring’s colleagues recalls—ostensibly as a means of differentiating its workforce from the ones seen at department stores of the era, but really to add intrigue for white visitors. Haring’s lovers also tended to be Latino; one ex, Juan Rivera, claims that Haring had a “rivalry” with Madonna that was based around “street-looking Latino boys.”

One walks away with the sense that Haring exoticized these Latino men because it added value to his life and art. But this is not something Gooch presses too hard, since his point, mainly, is to show that Haring’s gleeful commercialism was intentional. It’s places like these where the book fails to rebut the notion that Haring’s concessions to the whims of capitalism served a larger purpose.

As described in Radiant, the differences between Haring and his Black and Latino colleagues are stark. Rivera narrates a party held at the Whitney Museum where the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat drew away from the festivities while Haring reveled in them. “Jean-Michel would lock himself in the bathroom,” Rivera says, “and Keith would have to go spook him out, and he’d be like, ‘this party, man, and these people—they are just not my style.’”

Rivera leaves it unclear which party he’s describing. Gooch believes it was one held in 1986 to celebrate a collaboration between Haring and Absolut vodka—yet another example of how he had monetized his art, allegedly in the name of avant-garde radicalism. The party may not have been Basquiat’s style, but as Gooch makes clear, it certainly was Haring’s. It was loud, brash, and exciting. And it was sponsored by a big-name brand too.

The show’s premise appears at odds with established history: Basquiat was born in Brooklyn and rose to fame as a graffiti artist on New York’s Lower East Side. After his death in 1988 of an overdose at 27 at his home and studio on Great Jones Street, Basquiat was buried in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. He was always the epitome of New York cool. But the new show, and Gagosian, assert that Los Angeles, and specifically Venice Beach, was a critical turning point in Basquiat’s life and art.

As Gagosian told ARTnews over the phone recently, he was new to New York and the art scene when he met Basquiat in the high-ceilinged basement studio of Annina Nosei’s SoHo gallery in 1981.

“I had a loft on West Broadway where I’d hang a couple paintings every now and then, but I wasn’t very far along in my career as an art dealer when I met Basquiat,” Gagosian said. “I was an LA boy completely seduced by New York. Everything about it excited me.”

Basquiat too excited the young dealer. The artist was relatively unheard of when they met, but Gagosian, like Nosei, could tell that the artist had tapped into, or was creating, a new way of painting.

As he reminisced about the period, Gagosian recalled a quote from entertainment mogul and longtime client David Geffen, whose encyclopedic collection of postwar American art has been compared to the Frick’s collection of Old Masters. 

“Someone asked [Geffen] how to be successful in business,” Gagosian said. “David’s answer was ‘You keep your head down and hope you bump into a genius.’ Basquiat certainly was that genius for me. Besides his energy and talent, no one has made paintings like that before him or since. It was like Cubism. What he was doing just didn’t exist before.”

Shortly after meeting, Gagosian asked Basquiat if he would like a show in Los Angeles. Early the following year, just one month after Nosei’s New York gallery hosted the painter’s first exhibition, Gagosian opened a show of Basquiat’s work at his North Altamont Drive gallery. That November, Gagosian told the artist to come live with him in a new three-story home on Market Street in Venice Beach. The award-winning building, designed by Studio Works, came equipped with a gallery space and an extra studio apartment, the former of which became Basquiat’s workspace. 

Over the next two years, during two extended stays, Basquiat made 70 to 80 paintings at Venice Beach, Gagosian said. During the first stint, the artist and the dealer lived together for about a year. On the second trip, in 1983, Basquiat worked in a studio just a few doors down from Gagosian’s home and lived at L’Ermitage hotel in Beverly Hills.

“It didn’t take him long to get organized, to order canvases, paint,” Gagosian said. “He was such a driven artist … and a fun-loving guy to boot.”

As biographer Phoebe Hoban reccounts in Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (1998), the party began before the artist even reached Los Angeles. Gagosian bought first-class tickets for Basquiat and his crew—Rammellzee, Toxic, A1, and Fab 5 Freddie. As soon as the plane took off, they began to pour out cocaine and light up spiffs. “I’d never seen anything like it on a plane …” Gagosian told Hoban, “The stewardess freaked. I was terrified. I thought, ‘Oh god, we’re going to jail.” When the flight attendant told the group that police would be waiting for them when they hit the tarmac, Basquiat apparently looked up and said, “Oh, I thought this was first class.”

“The attendant came up to us after to warn us about Jean-Michel and his friends and said if they didn’t get rid of the cocaine the police would be waiting for them at the airport,” Annina Nosei, Basquiat’s first art dealer, told ARTnews. “Larry looked at me and said, ‘Annina, you are the mother, go and do something!’” 

As in New York, Basquiat quickly became a fixture in Los Angeles’ burgeoning club and music scene. Basquiat’s friend, occasional assistant, and Gagosian staffer Matt Dike was central to the city’s late-night scene and the two would spin records at the club Power Tools, go dancing with filmmaker Tamra Davis, who later directed Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (2010), and rub elbows with rappers Tone Loc and Young M.C. But, more than anything, Basquiat was in LA to work. 

“He was always working. There was always a pencil in his hand,” Gagosian said. He did stay out late, but often the events of the night before inspired the next day’s work.

The studio floor at Gagosian’s Venice Beach house was covered with paint splatter, books of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings, and Cy Twombly catalogues. Basquiat would move excitedly from canvas to canvas, as Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie played on the stereo. There was a mattress in the corner to rest on or, just as often, for friends like Davis, artist Mike Kelley, or Gagosian himself, to sit and watch Basquiat paint into the small hours. Basquiat’s then-girlfriend Madonna was a frequent guest during the artist’s first stay in LA, a veritable power couple at the time. Another guest, according to Gagosian, was Herbert Schorr, one of Basquiat’s earliest and most dedicated collectors.

“Such a smart collector, smarter than me,” Gagosian said, noting that Schorr bought, and has held on to some of Basquiat’s best paintings. “While I’m showing the paintings to Herb, Basquiat was just lounging under the covers with Madonna. It was hilarious.”

(Incidentally, Madonna, who is currently on tour, will perform at LA’s Kia Forum the day “Made on Market Street” opens.) 

It was also during the first stay in Los Angeles that Basquiat met Fred Hoffman, who co-organized “Made on Market Street.” Like most Angelenos, Hoffman met Basquiat through Gagosian, who proposed the two work together on a series of silkscreen works through Hoffman’s printing company, New City Editions. Among those is the monumental work Tuxedo, which was made in an edition of ten and is among the cornerstones of the new exhibition.

Tuxedo consists of a combined 15 separate drawings and one collage, originally done on white paper with black images. According to Hoffman, Basquiat wanted to reverse the colors for the final piece. They achieved this by using a photographic process and then turning the sixteen works into one large silkscreen. At just over 102 by 59 inches, the stark black-and-white Tuxedo, topped with Basquiat’s signature crown motif, stood as a consciously sharp contrast to the colorful works Basquiat regularly made. Hoffman, in a piece for Gagosian Quarterly about Tuxedo’s creation, said Basquiat’s wish to turn “everything white into black was not merely a look he desired to achieve. [His] aesthetic decisions were his means of questioning certain social and cultural assumptions, with identity most important among them.”

Another highlight of the exhibition is Hollywood Africans, which documents Basquiat’s LA sojourn, in a way. “It’s basically a history painting that depicts Jean-Michel and Rammellzee and Toxic in their journey through Hollywood,” Hoffman told ARTnews. “You know, going to Grauman’s Chinese Theater as tourists. Jean-Michel’s takeaway is to turn himself and his buddies into the new Black Hollywood celebrities.”

That work is one of many loans Gagosian and Hoffman were able to secure to put the show on. Hollywood Africans was purchased by television mogul Doug Cramer during Basquiat’s second show in Los Angeles, in 1983, and then later donated to the Whitney Museum in New York. Loans also came from the Broad Art Foundation in Los Angeles, the Museum Brandhorst in Munich, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and a handful of private collections that Gagosian was unsurprisingly tight-lipped about.

The work Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) stands out, not only because it’s one of the earliest works to comment on the high prices Basquiat was able to command, but also because it references one of his favorite movies, Black Orpheus (1959). In the show’s catalogue, Hoffman writes that it’s possible that the painting is also a veiled reference to Basquiat and Madonna’s doomed relationship, as the film is based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. 

“With Madonna’s sudden departure,” just weeks after she arrived, Hoffman writes, “and Black Orpheus on his mind, Basquiat undertook Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown), with its multiple texts and single image referring to [Orpheus’s] tragic relationship with Eurydice, as his means of imprinting on an artwork this seminal moment in his private life.”

At the time, Basquiat’s LA shows at Gagosian were quite the success. In a 2012 conversation with billionaire collector Peter Brant published in Interview Magazine, Gagosian said the exhibitions were a testament to Basquiat’s talent. “It’s one thing to have a successful show in New York with the local people, but then to move that type of work to Los Angeles and have it resonate—I mean, this was emphatically New York, urban work. Gives you a real sense of the power of the art that he was making.”

For art dealer Jeffrey Deitch, a longtime friend of Gagosian who was at both of Basquiat’s LA shows in the early ‘80s, the period is both “relatively little-known” and one of the “most important” of the artist’s career. 

“They are brighter,” Deitch told ARTnews of Basquiat’s pieces made in Venice Beach. “They have a little more pop, and the iconography is so strong. The distinctive quality of some of those LA works is a part of contemporary art history that still needs to be studied.”

Nosei agreed, telling ARTnews that the group of paintings done in Los Angeles were among the best Basquiat had done, and were far superior to the paintings Basquiat made for a solo show organized by Mary Boone and Bruno Bischofberger at Boone’s gallery in 1984.

That chapter, Deitch added, was highly important for Gagosian’s career too. “I’m not sure he ever had that kind of close relationship with an artist, sharing a house, and all the amazing work created there, it’s so significant,” he said.

For Gagosian and Hoffman, a show of Basquiat’s LA works, which includes works from a second stint during which he lived at West Hollywood’s L’Ermitage hotel, has been a long time in the making.

“I’d been thinking about a show like this for a while,” said Gagosian, whose gallery has put on at least five Basquiat shows since his death in 1988, “But I called Fred and said, ‘Let’s just do it, let’s commit to it.’ I just felt the time was right.”

Like the recent “King Pleasure,” a Basquiat exhibition organized by the late artist’s sisters that places the artist in the context of his family instead of the more glamorous parts of his career, “Made on Market Street” attempts to give life to an artist that many simply think about in terms of branding and hammer prices.

The eight-foot-tall Self Portrait as a Heel (Part Two), from 1982, will be offered during Sotheby’s evening auction of contemporary art on November 15, where it’s estimated to fetch between $40 million and $60 million. A high-quality Basquiat of such size is a rarity at auction; the last comparable offering was an untitled skull painting from the same year that sold for a record-setting $110 million at Sotheby’s in 2017.

Though Self-Portrait is not expected to edge or surpass that number, selling within its estimate would make it one of the the most highly valued works by Basquiat ever brought to a public auction.  

Per Sotheby’s, Basquiat made the self-portrait while living in the Venice home of dealer Larry Gagosian, who later organized the artist’s first show on the West Coast. Sotheby’s specialists believe it reflects Basquiat’s experience in Los Angeles as a rising art star with relative anonymity in Los Angeles. He created three works during this highly prolific period incorporating the word “heel,” a slang term for punk or delinquent. Additionally, in professional wrestling, the “heel” is the villain or foil to the match’s hero. 

David Galperin, head of contemporary art for Sotheby’s America, said in a statement, “Unlike other paintings by Basquiat that have sly references to himself, this painting self-consciously renders an image not only of who he understands himself to be but also of the way he felt others would inevitably perceive him—a testament to his own searching for himself and his vision for the lasting legacy of his artwork.”

Self-Portrait as a Heel, the Sotheby’s painting’s 1982 counterpart, sold for $5.9 million (with fees) at Christie’s in New York in 2010; the final work in the series, Hollywood Africans (1983), is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Self-Portrait as a Heel (Part Two) last appeared publicly in 1999, when it sold at Christie’s for $772,000. It was previously owned by Belgian collector Stéphane Janssen, who was an early patron of Basquiat, purchasing the painting from Gagosian shortly after its creation. According to the Art Newspaper, the consignor acquired the self-portrait from the London gallery Blain Southern prior to its shuttering in 2020. Self Portrait as a Heel (Part Two) will be exhibited at Sotheby’s New York galleries starting November 1.