"Portrait of the Artist as a Young Derelict" by Jean Michel Basquiat (1982)

Is Basquiat traditional art, though?

Sorry, it's a bad joke, I know. But it goes back to the art appreciation class I took in college. The teacher was a massive Basquiat fan, and would gladly sit outside under the trees after class talking about art or whatever.

There was this days long ongoing debate about where art becomes so abstracted that it ceases to be art and devolves into doodles, losing any meaning at all.

One part of that was Basquiat being the borderline of that kind of art. The teacher argued that as long as the artist was creating with intent and/or emotion rather than just unthinkingly and passively making movements, that it couldn't cross that line, and that Basquiat was still a traditional artist in that regard. Which caused this whole tangential debate about exactly how reliant on traditional materials and process you have to be to still be an artist.

No conclusions were reached, and the teacher refused to indulge in casual pedagogy, so would often abandon a stance or line of discussion just because he had been on it too long lol.

Basquiat couldn’t draw the cool S hahahaha