Money Talks: How Basquiat's Art Became a Good Investment

0:09Felix Salmon: Hello! Welcome to Money Talks, the episode of Slate Money where we talk to the most interesting people in the world about the most interesting subjects in the world. I'm Felix Salmon and And I am joined in the Slate Studios in Brooklyn today by Mr. Doug Woodham to talk about a Brooklyn boy. Doug, introduce yourself. Who are you?

0:40Doug Woodham: Well, Felix, thank you for having me on the show. I'm so glad to be here. So I guess relative to this Brooklyn boy that we're going to talk about, who's a famous artist. Sort of three things about my background that amplify the book. One is I used to be the president of the Americas for Christie's.

0:56Felix Salmon: and I have a financial advisory business in New York now that works with big collectors.

1:01Doug Woodham: Before that, my professional life was really one of being a partner with McKinsey & Company.

1:06Felix Salmon: You escaped McKinsey to go into art.

1:10Doug Woodham: Yeah, there's a detour until on the way, but yeah. So I sort of have a business and strategy mind.

1:18Felix Salmon: That's actually perfect. But the reason you're on the show, to get to the point, is you have written a book, and the name of the book is? Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Making of an Icon. We are going to talk about your book. We're going to talk about Jean-Michel Basquiat, his unique skills, his set of both artistic skills and social skills, but also about what happened to him after he died and what happened to his market after he died and the people who really made that, who made money, who capitalized on it. The role of Joe Lowe, the Malaysian fugitive. There's a lot to cover. It's all coming up on Money Talks.

2:02Felix Salmon: So this is a biography of Basquiat, but spoiler alert, he dies about a third of the way into the book. The thing that fascinated me about the book and the reason why I had to have you on this show is because you spend the majority or at least a large chunk of the book talking about exactly what you're saying in your subtitle, the making of the icon. He was, let's say, a demi-icon when he died. People kind of knew who he was. If you were a cool downtown scene today, you would know who he was. But he was definitely not the globally famous icon that he is today. And he became an icon. And you go into detail, and I feel like you're the only person who's really done this in book form.

2:48Felix Salmon: You've looked into how that happened. And of course, as a former auctioneer and a financial advisor and a former McKinsey person, you tie this into our favorite thing at Slate Money, which is money. And so let me just start off with the big question, which is, would it be fair to say that the degree to which Jean-Michel Basquiat has like icon status in the world is very highly correlated with the value of his paintings?

3:18Doug Woodham: I think certainly over the past 15 years, absolutely. Because there's a class of collector out there who, you know, the art on their walls reflects, you know, their personality, their wealth, their style, their taste. And so for some, until an artist gets into the double-digit millions territory. It's something that they're not that interested in. So when he broke sort of the 10, 15 million dollar barrier, suddenly, you know, billionaires around the world who collect, it was like, oh my God. And it had a curious effect because it was a little bit of an upward sloping demand curve.

3:55Felix Salmon: As we say in the trade. Translate that into English for me.

3:59Doug Woodham: So it means when something goes up in price, you covet it more. It might seem more exclusive. It might seem more important. It might seem something that's more aligned with your own personal narrative.

4:11Felix Salmon: And demand for it goes up rather than down. If you double the price of a slice of pizza, there are fewer people who are going to want it. If you double the price of a Basquiat painting, there are more people who are going to want it. Exactly.

4:23Doug Woodham: And I guess a non-art world analogy, just look what's been going on with Birkin bags and other luxury items. Some of the fashion houses drastically increased prices. And it didn't have a deleterious impact immediately on the number of sales they did, but it started to catch up with them.

4:40Felix Salmon: And we've ascertained that one of the reasons why people are buying Basquiat's is because they're expensive. Insofar as Basquiat's status as this pop culture icon, you know, he's very sexy, he's very good looking, he's very cool, He died at the age of 27. He's basically the Jimi Hendrix of the art world. All of the sort of aura of his personal story, how does that play into his values over time?

5:13Doug Woodham: So when he died in 1988, his prices popped for about 18 months. And so there was definitely a sort of death premium that people were paying.

5:22Felix Salmon: And just to be clear about this, like this is a good old fashioned form of economic logic where people kind of say, well, there aren't going to be any more Basquiat's coming onto the market. So there's a constrained supply of that's only what he ever painted. And now that's it. And so therefore, I don't need to worry about future dilution of my Basquiat. And so that's like kind of the opposite of what we were just talking about.

5:52Felix Salmon: product, the prices go up because suddenly it's everywhere and everyone wants it. In this case, it was like this idea of scarcity caused a bit of a bump, but we're not talking of a bump to$10 million, not even talking a bump to$1 million.

6:05Doug Woodham: Right, exactly. So when he died in 1988, I think the highest price that his gallerists sold a work for was$30 ,000. And that was in 1988 sums or 1987 sums. So you can, you know, price adjust it. It was a little bit more, but$30 ,000. You know, in the 18 months after he died, you know, he was selling for sort of 10x that. So the$30 ,000 painting was maybe a$300 ,000 painting. At that time, that was more a sort of spec play where he's not going to produce anymore. But nobody knew at that point in time how many paintings, how many drawings he made. So people were spending meaningful sums of money not knowing what the finite set was.

6:48Doug Woodham: There was no what's called a catalog resume, the sort of definitive reference book of everything. But what happened after that 18 months, the art market in the early 1990s utterly tanked and prices plummeted. And so work that had sold for meaningful sums in the first half of the 1990s, there was essentially no market for Basquiat's work. People weren't interested in buying it.

7:15Felix Salmon: And as an auctioneer, you know this better than anyone. If you approach an auction house saying, you know, I need to raise some money by selling some art and I have all of these paintings, they will take the paintings that they can sell and they won't take the paintings that they can't sell. So it's not so much that the price goes down so much as it is that those paintings just don't move. They never come to market at all. And people wound up sitting on Basquiat's, which were, to a first approximation, unsellable for some years.

7:47Doug Woodham: Yes. I emphasize that because in the first half of the 1990s, he wasn't known outside the sort of inside baseball contemporary art crowd. There was no global awareness of any significance of him. He was viewed more as a curiosity who was part of a group of other artists called Neo-Expressionists. And there was a real question mark about what was important and interesting about him. because while nowadays we look at his Warhol association as being unequivocally positive, you know, for many collectors at the time, they thought it was just a weird association to have. They weren't necessarily enamored with the fact that he would— I mean, the fact that he dated Madonna, that he knew Warhol, were interesting sort of pop culture stories, but he wasn't a pop culture figure back then.

8:36Doug Woodham: And collectors, they weren't persuaded necessarily by those things.

8:40Felix Salmon: And even Warhol was having a bit of a market lull in those years. Yes.

8:45Doug Woodham: Warhol's market, look, in the second half of the 1980s, Warhol's market was in the doldrums.

8:51Felix Salmon: And just so that, you know, to bring us up to speed, he then, fast forward to the 21st century, becomes the market darling of this century, basically. He starts to dominate sales and become just, like, I fear to think if anyone worked out the sort of total market cap of all Warhols in existence, but it would probably be many, many billions of dollars. Absolutely. Absolutely.

9:18Doug Woodham: And just as a sidebar on Warhol, look, Warhol's market started to get some momentum once again when the Museum of Modern Art did a retrospective

9:27Felix Salmon: of his work.

9:28Doug Woodham: And so it was the first time in many, many years that people got to see the sweep of his work, and they overemphasized quite appropriately his early work. And that actually brought Warhol back into the public eye.

9:42Felix Salmon: And this is a classic old school story of an artist, first of all, gets an institutional imprimatur of some gallery, in Basquiat's case, it would be an Ina Nose, and then maybe moves up a notch to a bigger gallery like Bruno Busschusberger, and then moves up a notch in terms of institutional and premature in terms of having retrospectives or shows or that kind of thing and then monographs get published and critics start writing lots of international art english words about whatever the hell they think the art means and eventually the artist gets adopted into the canon and everyone looks like well this is a very good artist so i therefore need to buy this artist and it's a sort of institution first critical reception first, market second kind of sequence.

10:34Felix Salmon: Is that what happened with Basquiat?

10:36Doug Woodham: No, not at all. So, you know, he dies and there was this sort of death premium, if you will, but then that fell apart when the contemporary art market collapsed in the early 1990s. And so there was a Whitney Museum retrospective of his work in 1992, did nothing to move prices for his work. So that sort of institutional notion actually didn't work with Basquiat in the early 1990s.

11:01Felix Salmon: You have a wonderful en passant thing in your book, which I want to quote. You say that it was the commercial taint to the work, the idea that it was more about money than art that made it less financially valuable, that people looked at the art and they thought, this is just, yeah, explain what they were thinking and how something that is more commercial could be less valuable.

11:26Doug Woodham: Yeah, so in the 1980s, it was one of a, you know, a couple handfuls of artists who were part of what was called the neo-expressionist movement.

11:33Felix Salmon: The other one that everyone will have heard of is Julian Schnabel, who went on to make a movie about Basquiat.

11:38Doug Woodham: So, you know, in the 1980s, there were many painters who were painting figures, bold colors, large works, graphic, and so all of those artists became darlings in the 1980s, and there was a tremendous amount of spec capital that came in and bought their work.

11:57Felix Salmon: Spec capital meaning people who buy the art just because they think it's going up in value and they want to make a profit by selling it in the future. Correct. Right.

12:04Doug Woodham: Lots of spec capital. And it actually drew in lots of collectors who thought, oh, this is cool. This is an alternative asset. I'm going to put some money to work in.

12:15Felix Salmon: This is the beginning of like Jeffrey Deitch and like art as an asset class and all of this kind of stuff. Right.

12:20Doug Woodham: So by the time Basquiat died, and certainly after that 18-month sort of death market, that came back in a vengeance. Many people were just, why is he important? Why is he interesting? Why should his work be something that I would buy? Because he was maybe part of the 1980s hype. And so there was definitely a commercial taint associated with him that prevented lots of, quote-unquote, serious collectors from wanting to buy his work.

12:53Felix Salmon: He seemed too kind of buzzy. Or was it just that thing about the 80s? Because the 80s were just a terrible decade in many ways. And people would, like, look at him like they might look at Peter Halley and just be kind of like, that's just dated.

13:05Doug Woodham: I think it was buzzy. It was also Basquiat, he was only active as an artist for about seven years, made a thousand paintings.

13:13Felix Salmon: Is that a lot or a little?

13:14Doug Woodham: That's a lot. A thousand works, a thousand paintings was a lot. Two thousand drawings was also a lot. In that body of work, there's a lot of bad Basquiat. And so the great Basquiat, you know, people weren't necessarily seeing. So a lot of people were seeing the bad Basquiat. And in the early 1990s, it was like, I don't see why this guy is important.

13:35Felix Salmon: Does the Whitney retrospective have a bunch of bad Baskia in it?

13:39Doug Woodham: They were very selective. They oversampled on the early work.

13:44Felix Salmon: The early work is always better, right?

13:46Doug Woodham: Actually, the work from sort of, you know, second half of 81, 82, squeaking into 83, generally all terrific. Then it becomes more of a mixed bag. I mean, starting in about 1986, his drug addictions just overwhelmed him. And he was just producing a lot of crap. And he was willing to sell anything to anybody for cash. And so lots of work left his studio, you know, fully compliant on his part that just wasn't very good. So back to the sort of institutional point. So people were concerned about the commercial taint from the 80s. People weren't buying that much art in the early 1990s. And so there were three folks who stepped into the middle of that who actually thought Bosque was a great artist, thought he had good long-term potential and proceeded to buy virtually every painting that was available in the marketplace and sought them out.

14:42Doug Woodham: And these three folks were the ones who prevented Basquiat's prices from falling even more.

14:49Felix Salmon: So again, this is an interesting question. Like intuitively speaking, because, you know, I, stupid person, think to myself, if I want to buy lot of Basquiat's, then I save money the further they fall. And so I want them to go down in price because then I pick up bargains. But these guys being smart weren't thinking that way.

15:09Doug Woodham: Yeah, because look, these were all wealthy people, all two of them in particular. One was more of a working man. You know, even for them, if you're going to start devoting capital to something, you want to have a sense that the long-term potential is there.

15:23Felix Salmon: So who were these three men and were they what you would call spec capital?

15:29Doug Woodham: There were aspects of what they did that were absolutely spec capital. But if all you are is a spec capital provider in the art market, you're going to get duped because you're not necessarily going to have a good eye on what's good or what's bad. And you're not going to have a sense of how you might need to market these works to a curatorial community, to the press and others. So all three of these were art literate folks who were very savvy about the inner workings of the art market. But one is a fellow, José Magrabi. José Magrabi was already a big Warhol investor. And at the time he started buying Basquiat in depth, he had probably the largest collection of Warhol that he had acquired.

16:14Doug Woodham: And so he thought that Basquiat being adjacent both to Warhol and also he always thought of Basquiat as the Jimi Hendrix. And so Jose is a sort of speak-your-mind sort of guy. So he really loved the audacity of Basquiat. He showed me the spreadsheet of every Basquiat he's ever owned. Over his lifetime, he's owned, I think it was 432 Basquiat paintings. He either still owns them or has owned them. The other fellow was Peter Brandt. Peter Brandt was a, I mean, Jose's still on the planet. Peter Brandt is still on the planet. Peter Brandt was a big Warhol buyer, became infatuated with art at a very young age, bought a few works by Basquiat before Basquiat died and actually met him through Warhol.

16:58Doug Woodham: But he actually, Peter Brandt has a very educated eye. He actually saw talent and uniqueness and something of real importance in Basquiat's work. And so he sought out like the best works that he could find in the marketplace. And so, you know, he might be buying six or eight works a year while Jose was buying, you know, 30 to 50. And then the third fellow was a fellow by the name of Enrico Navarra. Enrico was the Parisian at a gallery in Paris. And Enrico, I think, had in particular the business savvy to know black artists had not actually become part of the canon in the U.S. in any meaningful way.

17:38Doug Woodham: And he, I think, believed that Basquiat, once museums and collectors started to make that pivot to sort of broaden the canon, Basquiat would be on the list. So he wanted to be long Basquiat. But the special thing that Enrico did is he's the one who created, it's not officially a catalog resume, but he's the one who over a sort of four or five year period, he and his team did the heavy lifting, creating a book, summarizing with pictures and whatever archival information they could get, every Basquiat painting that they could get their hands on.

18:16Felix Salmon: And you can go onto Amazon right now and search it out. And if you can find a copy, it'll be well over$1 ,000.

18:23Doug Woodham: The thing that's interesting about Enrico, and I'll give you a sense of these, like all three of these fellows, big personalities. Enrico, look, he had a gallery in Paris. And his view was if you create a book, you know, having a book that's a coffee table book, it gives a sense for people the finite supply of work by the artist. You can flip through it. You can compare and contrast works to figure out which one might be better than the other. He actually liked to create these books and give them away to collectors and institutions, never sell them. So this book that we're talking about, when it was finally done with some other addendums to it, it's like a 12-pound book, three volumes.

19:02Doug Woodham: You know, Enrico and his gallery printed about 25 ,000 copies of this book and gave them away. I mean, they did partnership deals with, you know, Sotheby's. So when Sotheby's was doing, you know, a dinner for top clients, you know, one of the giveaway presents was the Enrico Navarro book. So he was a clever marketer. He knew how to get placement.

19:22Felix Salmon: I mean, it's not cheap to print a 12-pound coffee-per-table book, but he invested in this book. He managed to get in crucially with Jean-Michel's dad, who controlled the estate and was able to include a lot of works that were owned by the estate. And as you say, he kind of made it clear for the first time roughly how many of these things there were, and by putting them all next to each other, which ones were better than which other ones.

19:51Doug Woodham: Exactly. That finite supply notion is actually extremely important in the art market. Because even if you're a billionaire, you want to know, like, what am I buying? And how important is this? And how does it compare to other works? And while you may be relying on, you know, your advisor to help you sort through that question, having a catalog resume, this sort of book of authority of most of the work, is extremely important in giving people confidence to not only spend money, but maybe to spend big money for a great work by that artist.

20:26Felix Salmon: One of the peculiarities of the art world is that, as far as I can make out, no one knows how many Damien Hirst spot paintings there are. This is like a very closely guarded secret. And in fact, more generally in the art world, this is a world that thrives on opacity and secrets. And if you know something, you don't tell anyone because that's your edge and that's how you make money. and gerald basquiat the executor of the estate and john michelle's dad was similarly very very played his cards very close to the chest didn't tell everyone what he owned or didn't allow paintings to be reproduced very much he kept that opacity going and obviously if you are a big dealer in basquiat and you're building a collection like mcgrabby was like navarro was like grant was part of what you do is you get to know everyone, you try and work out where everything is, how much people might want for what, and you get to make money just by having more information than anyone else about this particular artist.

21:32Felix Salmon: So you were at Christie's for years, you understand this better than anyone. On a scale of like one to normal, how opaque is the Basquiat market?

21:42Doug Woodham: So in terms of the body of work that he made, that's pretty transparent because of this Enrico Navarro book. You know, other things will pop in the marketplace from time to time, sometimes fakes, but that's pretty clear. The opaque part of the art market, it's not so much about the object. It's about who owns the object and what's their propensity to sell it. So Catalog Resonés, these books, they actually help bring certainty to the market. But people trade on, you know, they keep very private the information of who owns what. And what are their circumstances behind owning it and maybe being willing to part ways with it?

22:24Felix Salmon: One of the great certainties in the art world, the only way you can really be certain about anything in the art world, insofar as you can be certain about anything in the art world, is that if you have a great work in a museum that is owned by the museum, then their propensity to sell is zero, and that work is never going to come on the market. And it then also has all of the sort of aura, institutional aura of that museum. And one of the interesting things about Basquiat is by the standards of other artists in his echelon, of these artists who sell for$100 million for a painting, there are very few major works in museums.

23:03Felix Salmon: What's up with that?

23:04Doug Woodham: So when he was alive, the only museum that actually, the museum that had the most Basquiat's was the Israel Museum. Randomly. They had two paintings. So they bought one painting in 1982 by a young curator who met Anita Nose and heard the story about Basquiat. And they actually paid$9 ,000 for this painting. They still have it. And then two years later, a New York collector donated one of Basquiat's most famous boxer paintings. It's like, you know, the sort of massive painting of this boxer with raised arms. So the Israel Museum had two, and there were a few other museums that had them. But museums, look, back in the 1980s, a black artist with a sort of street art tinge to it who died of a drug overdose, not something that most museums are interested in buying.

23:51Doug Woodham: So it was just not there. In the first half of the 1990s, the same thing remained true. There was a great deal of skepticism institutionally about why this kid is relevant. And so part of the reason why Jose Mugabe, Peter Brandt, and Enrico Navarro are so important, they hoovered up most of the available work. And they also started to create packaged shows, particularly Enrico Navarro and Jose Mugabe, packaged shows of Basquiat's work that they started offering to museums around the world.

24:27Felix Salmon: And they thought that was better than just trying to donate works. And the estate was not donating works. And somehow, here we are in 2025, a quarter of the way into the 21st century, and, you know, much even further than that into, you know, Jean-Michel being dead. And even to this day, like, you would think that a bunch of those collectors who were buying in the 90s and the 2000s would be in the sort of donating zone right now. Not really happening so much.

24:55Doug Woodham: Yeah, so most people who own Basquiat, who bought Basquiat, it's funny, they own it for four, five, six years and then sell it because, again, prices have gone up. You know, you bought something for$300 ,000 and now it's like$3 million. Oh, my God, I would have never imagined this would be$3 million and you can sell it. I'll sell it. And the person who bought it for three, it's then when it goes to 15. So it's interesting how Basquiat paintings rarely have had one owner. They've had multiple owners.

25:24Felix Salmon: And in fact, there is this phenomenon in the art world whereby it's when a painting goes down in value that it starts becoming particularly attractive to donate because you can donate it at the value you bought it at rather than necessarily the value that it might fetch in the secondary market.

25:41Doug Woodham: Yeah, well, you still need to get a fair market value appraisal. You can probably find that. There are various rules and regulations that appraisers are supposed to follow. But I think so by the time institutions were interested in Basquiat, he'd become too expensive for them to buy. And the collectors who maybe owned him long term or bought him in the past 10 years, even if they're getting on in year 70, 80, 90. You know, if you've got a 30, 40, 50 million dollar painting, you just might not be willing to donate it to a museum, even posthumously. You know, the tax write-off is not enough to compensate you for giving that painting up.

26:22Doug Woodham: So essentially, there are really only two places in the world where you can go and see Basquiat works. One is the Broad Museum in L.A. The Broad couple, they bought 14 works by Basquiat in a fairly short period of time from 82 to 84 and donated 13 of them to the museum that they funded and created in Los Angeles. And those works are oftentimes on view. The other is a woman in Zug, Switzerland, Nicola Ernie, who's assembled just a marvelous collection of Basquiat's work. She has a private museum that's opened by appointment, and so you can go see the work, and oftentimes it's on view. So there is this sort of—most people haven't seen Basquiat's work.

27:05Doug Woodham: I mean, they've just seen it in pictures.

27:07Felix Salmon: I mean, it does reproduce very well. Yeah, yeah. But by the same token, as you detail in the book, like getting permission to reproduce these works is decidedly non-trivial.

27:19Doug Woodham: They reproduce well, but Basquiat painted like big works. So there's one painting I absolutely love. It's called Dust Heads. And he did it in 1982. And it's of two angel dust abusers on the Lower East Side. One's euphoric, the other's crashing. And it's just this incredibly vivid painting. Looks great on an iPhone or an iPad, but it's like a six-by-six-foot painting. And so you see this painting standing in front of it. It's just so cool. It's in much the same way, I mean, like if you look at big Monet water lily paintings, they reproduce well, but when you go to a museum and say, oh my God, this is 10 by 12 feet, that's more of an immersive experience.

28:00Doug Woodham: I mean, Bosquette, there are lots of Bosquette paintings that are 10 by 12 feet, you know, the 8 by 10 feet, 6 by 6 feet. And so scale, which I think mattered to him and actually really ratchets up the impact when you see it live, you just don't get that online. So there is a sort of tragedy that there's all this work that people can't see because it's not in museums. I mean, it does show both the visual power of the work that you do see online and it also just is a testament to the sort of mythologizing that's come around him. that, you know, he's a cool character. I mean, he's become in many ways what Pollock was probably in the 60s and 70s, where in the 60s and 70s, if you were culturally aware and culturally literate, even if you hated Jackson Pollock's work, you would never ridicule it.

28:52Doug Woodham: Like, that just wouldn't be good in the social circles you traveled in. In much the same way, today, nobody's going to say anything bad about Basquiat because he's too much part of the cultural zeitgeist.

29:01Felix Salmon: One of the interesting things about Basquiat basquiat is that for all that his paintings especially in reproduction can feel very sort of crude and almost childlike you know there's a few times in your book where you mention him in the same breath as jean dubuffet who might also be in that category what you don't get in this book is any is is the standard rite of passage of an avant-garde artist where a bunch of people look at the work and sneer at it and go, oh, that's terrible. And then eventually they're won over by some sort of connoisseurship or something. People who were looking at the work from the very beginning totally got it.

29:43Felix Salmon: As you say, he came up in a world of neo-expressionism where people understood Julian Schnabel and Sandro Gia and all these other people. I feel like one of the interesting things about Basquiat is that he might be the first modern artist or one of the first modern artists to never have that kind of period of popular misunderstanding. There was never that period when people were like sneering at him going, that's not art. He became a children's book quite famously. And everyone's like, this is great art. I love it. And a children's book. Yes.

30:13Doug Woodham: Yes. One aspect of that, that I think underpins the visual imagery that he latched onto and why it was so powerful. And it's a big theme in the book is Basquiat was an intellectually gifted child. Well before he took pencil to paper, this was a kid who was reading articles in the New York Times magazine when he was in first grade. So he was an intellectually gifted kid.

30:40Felix Salmon: He went to St. Anne's School in Brooklyn, which is a place where intellectually gifted kids get all of the nurturing and education they need.

30:48Doug Woodham: He was a one percenter. And I spent a lot of time talking to all of the gifted children's scholars, because there's this huge body of research on them, and they oftentimes share characteristics, things like they are able to absorb and retain huge volumes of information for long periods of time. They're able to see connections in that material beyond what a seven-year-old would normally see. They pursue interests passionately and deep dive on them. Basquiat exhibited all of that. And he also exhibited this uncanny ability to move between name that social setting or social sort of circle. I mean, he was incredibly adept at dealing with wealthy collectors.

31:36Doug Woodham: He was incredibly adept at dealing with, you know, the downtown mud club scene. He was incredibly adept at working and navigating through the gay community in New York, which he was part of. So I think understanding Bosquette, it's really important to embrace the idea of an intellectually gifted kid who also had a great visual sense. But without being intellectually gifted and all these sort of patterns that I was talking about, the work he would have created would have looked very different. He also, I don't think, would have ever had the intelligence or skills to figure out as a 21-year-old how to navigate the downtown gallery scene.

32:17Right.

32:18Felix Salmon: Like not only is he intellectually gifted with an astonishing understanding of art history, plus really, as you say, he went deep into art production. You have this story about when he was working out of Anina Nose's gallery in her basement, he would be like at the door at 10 o 'clock in the morning, every morning. And if he was 15 minutes late, he'd be apologizing. He produced a lot of work in that time. That is a sort of portrait that we can recognize. And then on top of that, he had the social skills to be able to, you know, get Madonna to fall in love with him. Exactly.

32:51Doug Woodham: I really emphasize this intellectual giftedness because, you know, for 40 years, I've been looking at Basquiat's work, you know, reading about him. He's been my sort of OCD treat. But until I interviewed some of his family members and found out about this aspect of his profile, the breadth of his visual imagery was always confusing to me because it was so broad. I was like, where in the world did this come from? So understanding his intellectual skills became this huge door opener. And then it also became the way that I understood why he was able to connect with all manner of people, particularly with collectors.

33:28Doug Woodham: I mean, look, collectors, the people who are spending money buying art, they're business people. I mean, in the US, historically, it hasn't been legacy money. It's not a bunch of philanthropy types or trust fund cases. is people who've had businesses, work in financial services. They have like real minds and real business. He could talk with them about topics and issues.

33:47Felix Salmon: And to be clear, not to put too fine a point on it, literally every single one of the collectors that he meets over the course of his career is white. It's only much later that you start getting, I don't know, Lenny Kravitz or Jay-Z or someone like that starting to buy up his work.

34:03Doug Woodham: Yeah, I'm sure there was a black collector. I actually talked to Anina Nose about that, you know, in all the time that you were selling Basquiat, she had Black and Hispanic collectors who were buying her artists, but never Basquiat. I think at the time, Basquiat was probably just, if you were an affluent Black professional working on Wall Street or in corporate America, you know, Basquiat might have just been too street for you to be hanging in your home. It was probably just easier for a white person to do it.

34:34Felix Salmon: we need to take a quick break and when we come back we are going to talk about how Jean-Michel Basquiat got into bed so to speak with Jay-Z and Beyonce

34:52Felix Salmon: so the big question I had reading the book is you know you have this astonishing confluence of skills and abilities in the person of Jean-Michel. He dies in 1988. His paintings are worth$30 ,000. At that point, for all of his skills and abilities, like they're worth nothing. They're six feet under. He's buried at Greenwood Cemetery. And then you get this sort of Holy Trinity of Mugrabi and Brandt and Navarra coming together. And again, like the causality here is not obvious, but there's certainly a correlation, if not a causation, that like, it's during the point at which these three men are really aggressively bidding up the Basquiat market that he starts becoming worth millions of dollars per piece.

35:41Felix Salmon: And so the real question that I think underpins this book, and the really interesting question more generally about Basquiat is was the financial value of his work built by three white men or was it built by him?

35:57Doug Woodham: Those three men would not have been investing in Basquiat if they didn't think that he was a real talent. I mean, pushing a dead rock up a hill in the art world is just, it's hard. So, look, he had to have this sort of innate talent and skill. They were the ones who brought him back into focus and attention, both by buying the work in volume and doing these packaged museum shows, there were three other really important factors that boosted Basquiat's posthumous career. One was a movie that came out in 1996 that Peter Brandt, one of these big collectors, financed that Julian Schnabel was the director of.

36:35Doug Woodham: And what was important about that movie is before that movie came out, Basquiat was still just a denizen of sort of the inside baseball contemporary art world. People just didn't know about him. I mean, this was a point in time where a museum doing a retrospective of a contemporary artist in the first half of the 1990s, they were thrilled if they got 20 ,000 or 30 ,000 people to come to that show. You know, contemporary art in museums just was not the draw it is today. So this movie actually brought Basquiat to the masses, like a million people.

37:06Felix Salmon: Shout out to Jeffrey Wright, who plays Basquiat, a great actor. Really terrific in it.

37:12Doug Woodham: The other thing was, look, starting in the early 1990s, the art world began its pivot to identity being a really important subject matter for purposes of evaluating contemporary art. And so how artists dealt with issues of gender, race, sexuality, and dealing with themes of oppression and income inequality, you know, that started in the early 1990s with a couple of shows that the Whitney put on. And that sort of zeitgeist change, which took a while for it really to achieve the sort of airlift momentum that it got. I mean, the art world today is sort of rife with that and drives lots of people's thinking about who's an interesting artist and why.

37:56Doug Woodham: But Basquiat became sort of the black artist that many people thought they should own.

38:02Felix Salmon: almost to a fuller. Certainly, you know, when I was a baby Felix learning up about contemporary art, I always was told or believed that Basquiat's ancestry was mostly Haitian. And one of the things I learned in this book is like, he never went to Haiti. He never spoke French. Like, Puerto Rican, absolutely. He was very Puerto Rican, but he wasn't Haitian at all. But Haitian does feel a lot more exotic. Exactly.

38:29Doug Woodham: Look, he was exoticized for a while. And, you know, it was just also his dad was of Haitian birth. But look, his dad came to the U.S. He was upwardly mobile. He was an accountant. You know, the notion of voodoo in Haiti is sort of hysterical, if you know anything about Basquiat's dad.

38:46Felix Salmon: But look, people sort of think that they used to, but not. We've grown out of that now. So a few years ago, we had the authors of Billion Dollar Whale on this show.

38:58Doug Woodham: Oh, terrific, terrific.

38:59Felix Salmon: The Billion Dollar Whale being this guy, Joe Lowe, the Malaysian fraudster, who became one of the defining Basquiat buyers of the early part of this century and indeed bought Dust Heads, the massive picture that you were talking about. and when you were sort of pitching this or you or your publicist were pitching this book to me, there's a whole like bit in there about how Joe Lowe was responsible for a whole step up in the fame and valuation of Basquiat. I'm like, you've got to be fucking shitting me. But you're going to like die on this hill.

39:35Doug Woodham: Well, I think it's just, it's true.

39:39Felix Salmon: I will let you have it, but only if it's true. So for people who, So, look, Jolo, Malaysian fraudster, went to British boarding schools, went to Wharton for college,

39:51Doug Woodham: and figured out how to get the son-in-law of the Malaysian prime minister to set up a sovereign wealth fund in Malaysia that used Malaysia's credit rating to be able to raise billions in bonds with that money, theoretically, to be invested in infrastructure projects in Malaysia. Lots of countries do that.

40:12Felix Salmon: Well, to be fair, not many countries do that. with debt. But yes, Malaysia tries to do this with debt. The money, as we now know, gets invested in parties and basquets rather than in infrastructure projects.

40:24Doug Woodham: So I think within six months of that deal closing, he was siphoning, you know, tens of millions of dollars into accounts that he controlled. And look, Jolo is this sort of baby face 20-something, became a darling in New York, buying beautiful apartments in, you know, mortar building, befriending Leonardo DiCaprio, and also buying art. And I think his art affection came through his relationship with Leonardo DiCaprio. And so the first artwork he bought was a Basquiat painting.

40:56Felix Salmon: He loves surrounding himself with celebrities, two of the celebrities he's closest to, Leonardo DiCaprio and Swiss Beats, both of whom are huge art collectors. And next thing you know, there he is in the auction house, raising his paddle, buying dust heads, paying how much for it?

41:12Doug Woodham: Paid like$48 million.

41:13Felix Salmon: Which is a lot of money even for Joe Lowe.

41:16Doug Woodham: Because the previous auction record had been, I think at that point in time, was like$22 or$25 million. So it was this sort of staggering price that he was willing to pay. In part, he had no price point barriers whatsoever. Leonardo DiCaprio and Swiss Beats were in the skybox with Joe Lowe when he was buying this painting. And when it sold for that price, and I was at Christie's at that point in time, I was the president of Christie's. I remember standing in the auction room when this painting sold. It was like, oh, my God. And they were up in the skybox, which had, you know, one-way mirror glass.

41:51Doug Woodham: They started pounding on the window. And I remember the whole audience, like 700 people in the audience, like peering up, wondering, who's in that box? But so it had that sort of upward sloping demand curve phenomenon we talked about in the beginning. when it went for that big a price, it absolutely became a signal to many people. Oh my God, I didn't know he was that famous. I didn't know he was that important. I didn't know he was that valuable. Got to get me some of that Basquiat. He's now on my list. Maybe I can't afford a painting, but oh my God, maybe I should get a drawing. Like here's a rocket ship that's taken off.

42:28Doug Woodham: And shortly after that, like a year after that, another billionaire stepped in and paid an even higher sum for another painting. So he absolutely had an impact on the market and changing people's perceptions. It's sort of, again, weird to think of like, God, he paid, I think it was$48 million. If the previous auction record had been$25, wouldn't that stop people from buying? It just drew attention and became a sort of worldwide story. The thing that's interesting, tying back on finance, because this is a money show, which I like. So this painting sells for like$48 million. You know, a year later, another painting sells for like$50 million to a Japanese tech entrepreneur.

43:08Doug Woodham: And about three, four weeks after he spends that money, it's disclosed that Dust Heads has sold privately for like$35 million. It sold for less than what Jolo had bought. So that information wasn't in the public domain at the time that this other auction occurred. And so it was one of those like, oh, my God, if that had been widely known, I think it might have changed the trajectory a bit.

43:31Felix Salmon: One of the interesting themes of this book is it seems like the Basquiat family is the only rich family in America to actually pay the estate tax, which has happened like twice. There's a lot of talk about the IRS valuing paintings and saying, like, we want to get, you know,$140 million or something off you in estate tax. first when Jean-Michel dies, then when his dad dies. And this is partly a function of the fact that there's no Jean-Michel Basquiat foundation. No one ever set up like a non-profit entity to look after anything. As you say, the de facto catalog raisonnée was very much a for-profit project by one of Basquiat's collectors.

44:14Felix Salmon: And to this day, the estate is out there, like licensing images, looking up, trying to find revenue streams, and basically behaving in a much more commercial way than the overwhelming majority of artists' estates.

44:29Doug Woodham: I think that's true. The only hesitation you're hearing my voice, so Basquiat's dad, Gerard, again, an accountant, smart guy, he's also part of the secret sauce behind why Basquiat is so famous today because he really tightly controlled the narrative around his son's shows, etc. But he very much wanted to own as much of his son's work as he possibly could. When his son died of a drug overdose, his two parents, who never divorced but were deeply estranged from each other, inherited 171 paintings by Basquiat and about 1 ,000 drawings. And they also inherited a bunch of works by Warhol and a few other artists.

45:09Doug Woodham: Basquiat didn't trade that much art with people. You know, he had a James Van Der Zee photograph or two, but he just basically had 20 Warhols. So Gerard, I think seeing what Magrabe, Peter Brandt, Enrico Navarro were doing, it was like, oh my God, I shouldn't sell this because this is probably going to be worth even more. But I think it was also just a way for him to deal with the grief that he had with his son dying. So there's always been this theme with how he managed the estate of, when in doubt, keep the paintings and drawings. Sell the Warhols, which he did with the exception of two Warhols.

45:46Doug Woodham: And he became very enamored with how Keith Haring, both in his lifetime and Keith Haring's foundation after he died, used licensing to generate revenue to be able to pay the insurance premiums on the art they own, to do books, etc. So it, I think, was an emotive response on Gerard's part to his son dying and what he thought was right. It was also a financially motivated move on his part. And so part of the reason why there's just, it's amazing the Basquiat merchandise. I mean, you want underwear with, you know, you want candles, you want snowboards, you want a tequila bottle. So, like, I think the only two objects that I don't think the estate has licensed images to are bongs and, you know, and wrapping paper, which just would be not a good thing to do given that he died of a drug overdose.

46:38Doug Woodham: But all of that licensing, you know, they're making millions of dollars a year off of that. Again, it pays insurance premiums. It pays for a bunch of stuff.

46:45Felix Salmon: It has not hurt his career.

46:46Doug Woodham: It has not hurt market impression. In fact, the commercialization of artists that's occurred, like Herring, like Cause, like Murakami, you know, as you've got toys, low-priced prints out there, and people start seeing it, it becomes a signal to, you know, young collectors. Oh, this is an important artist. Maybe when I'm wealthy and I can afford to buy a drawing for three months, I want a Basquiat. So inside the art world, like, randomly select a museum curator. They're appalled. the amount of licensing that the Basquiat estate has done or the Herring estate. But it hasn't hurt his market impression.

47:26Doug Woodham: And it's also made even more people aware of him. And it's made it possible for millions of people around the world to own a little piece of Basquiat.

47:34Felix Salmon: One of the few clear value judgments that you make in the book is when you write about the purchase of a major Basquiat by Tiffany. Oh, yeah. and its subsequent appearance in a major ad campaign featuring Jay-Z and Beyonce, which you describe as being remarkably ostentatious and vulgar.

47:57Doug Woodham: Yeah, Tiffany's bought this Basquiat painting that has a blue background, that has this sort of uncannony resemblance to the Tiffany blue. They tried to draw that association. It certainly wasn't in Basquiat's mind when he made this painting, But there's this very famous picture of Jay-Z and Beyonce with this Bosque Alpine. And so I thought it was very interesting how they were using these three brand ambassadors to make the Tiffany brand and the Tiffany blue box more relevant. What I thought was, oh, my God, so vulgar. They took this painting. You know what an advent calendar is. An advent calendar is like this little calendar where you count down the months of December.

48:37Doug Woodham: And, you know, sometimes there's a little box and you'll open and there's a piece of candy. I think it has Germanic tradition. They created this piece of furniture that on the front of it was a replica of this Basquiat painting that they had bought. And you open the doors to this cabinet and in were the 24 blue boxes from Tiffany's numbered for each day that had, you know, a beautiful Tiffany bangle. They were selling this. I think they're asking prices$150 ,000.

49:08Felix Salmon: dollars to be clear about this i think you say that they paid 20 odd million dollars for the

49:14Doug Woodham: painting in the i didn't get the exact price but it was in the vicinity of 20 in the neighborhood

49:18Felix Salmon: now clearly the reason they bought the painting is so that they could put it in an ad campaign and they could turn it into an advent calendar and it could become like a part of their brand and if you go up to 57th and 5th you can it's actually one of the few major basquets that you can see in New York City. Absolutely.

49:34Doug Woodham: And it's a great Basquiat painting.

49:37Felix Salmon: And yet, because as you say, Gerard Basquiat controls the copyright to Basquiat's paintings very closely, they would never have dreamed of buying this painting unless it came as a kind of job lot with the copyright. They needed the copyright and the rights to reproduce it in all manner of different ways and forms. To use in the AI. Almost more than they needed the painting itself.

50:01Doug Woodham: That's a good point.

50:02Felix Salmon: So my question for you is, which one cost them more? The rights or the painting?

50:09Doug Woodham: The estate, if they like you, doesn't charge much for licensing rights. If it's for a product, they will. And so Tiffany's was a product. It was a substantial discount off of the$20 million for the painting.

50:20Felix Salmon: There's no way they spent$20 million on the licensing fee.

50:24Doug Woodham: I mean, if they even spent a million dollars, I'd be surprised. But pure speculation on my part.

50:28Felix Salmon: The market is interesting that way because in a way, like the object is nice. It looks pretty in the flagship store, but it's the ability to put it in glossy ads in magazines that really gives it value to its current owner.

50:45Doug Woodham: Yes. The vignette I have in the book about the Tiffany's campaign, the reason why I thought it was important was it showed just how far the Basquiat brand had traveled from the time of his death. You literally had this ad, this picture. It's people know who Beyoncé and Jay-Z are because Jay-Z is sitting in a chair looking up at Beyoncé. Behind them, leaning on a wall, is a Basquiat painting. There's no text. There's nothing. And so it's just the fact that they were investing in a brand campaign with these three icons where it's just a Basquiat painting that actually hadn't been reproduced much.

51:24Doug Woodham: It's not anything that anybody would have really have ever seen before. but stylistically you sort of think that it's a Basquiat. To me, it was just so emblematic of just how he had become this pop culture icon.

51:37Felix Salmon: He's famous in a way that, like, he's a celebrity. You know, there's lots of rich artists, but since Warhol and maybe like Salvador Dali, it's hard to think of anyone who has the celebrity status that Basquiat has.

51:52Doug Woodham: The only one that's sort of in that category, Frida Kahlo, because she's just so well known.

51:57Felix Salmon: He had her own movie as well. But I feel like she's kind of getting, you know, Leonora Carrington is coming up behind her. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

52:06Doug Woodham: The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston is doing a Frida Kahle retrospective. It's called Frida, the Making of an Icon. No way! They stole your book title! How dare they!

52:17Felix Salmon: But to just sort of summarize the arc of things.

52:20Doug Woodham: So, again, what were the forces and factors behind why kids walking around Singapore have a Basquiat t-shirt on and a billionaire collector on Central Park South has a Basquiat painting. You know, a key ingredient were these three collectors who I mentioned came in and bought in depth and created package shows and were the evangelists.

52:39Felix Salmon: You know, a second thing was the movie that really pushed him outside the bounds of the art world into the public domain.

52:45Doug Woodham: Third was his dad, who was just such a strategic marketer and manager of the estate. And then there There was the shift in the art world toward identity being paramount and Basquiat being deemed the top of the heap in that category. So I think those are many of the factors. It built on Basquiat being intellectually gifted, which drove both the subject matter, his drive, his ambition, and his ability to navigate many markets.

53:13Felix Salmon: And it also just—many of the early paintings, they're just profoundly interesting.

53:18Doug Woodham: They're beautiful. They're interesting. They're wonderful to look at. And so I do think he's an enormous talent.

53:25Felix Salmon: It helps if you're good.

53:26Doug Woodham: It really helps if you're good. But good is not a sufficient condition.

53:30Felix Salmon: It's necessary, but not sufficient. So I think just to finish up, the obvious question I think people are going to be asking themselves is, so does it also help to be dead? Like being like the romantic death at the age of 27, if you're like Jim Morrison or Rambo or Jesus.

53:49Doug Woodham: You know, in a sense, we're not seeing an overweight 65-year-old Basquiat, you know, regaling you with stories in the bar. And I remember on Eden and Jose. He's forever young. And because he died young, I mean, Keith Haring died young too, and he's so associated with that downtown scene. I mean, around the world, there's so many people that just the 1980s New York with Blondie and Madonna. It's just so iconic, so important. And so he's a character of that. His death helped from a market perspective. It's tragic that it happened. It's awful that it happened.

54:25Felix Salmon: It's also... What do you think he'd be doing today if he was alive? I have this feeling that he would be heavily into fashion, that he would be doing like the Virgil Abloh, Kanye, Pharrell kind of move into becoming a luxury fashion person.

54:42Doug Woodham: Yeah, well, there's a long vignette in the book about six months before he dies. He's in Paris for a gallery show, and there's a photographer who's taking photographs of him. And they just share this sort of really interesting conversation about Warhol. And he revealed to that photographer, and he had done that to some other friends, that he wanted to leave the art world. He wanted to become a writer. I mean, he loved Beat Generation. He loved Burroughs. Really into Kerouac, right? That was his thing. Really into Kerouac, which is, like, Kerouac is, for me, it's impossible to read. I mean, it's just, I've tried so many times.

55:15Doug Woodham: But he loved Kerouac. And so he talked to this photographer about how his intent was to move to Los Angeles, have a quieter life, and be a writer. And, you know, I imagine if he hadn't died, I think there's a good chance he would have done that. Whether he would have found commercial success in it, who knows. But I think the written word mattered to him. And I think, again, all supposition, all speculation, he created so many visual, like these paintings. There's some of them that are just so terrific. He also mentioned create a lot of crap. And the crap is, you know, there's a lot of it in the past couple of years.

55:55Doug Woodham: I think he was done with art. I think he was done with visual images. I think his memory banks, his idea banks, he was done. I like the romantic notion of him not being in a garret and, you know, something. and probably be on the beach.

56:09Felix Salmon: Sitting by the pool in Beverly Hills.

56:10Doug Woodham: Yeah, I think, right. I think he liked fashion. He was actually somewhat of a shy guy

56:15Felix Salmon: and a very fragile guy.

56:17Doug Woodham: You know, from talking to his friends, I always imagined him as being a more boisterous, outgoing, fill-the-room guy. He was a much more hesitant, you know, he was able...

56:28Felix Salmon: Not unlike Andy.

56:30Doug Woodham: You know, that's a good point. That's a good point. Actually, one of his girlfriends said, look, he had this great skill. Well, he could be in a room with 50 people and he could figure out who were the two or three coolest people in the room.

56:40Felix Salmon: Just like Andy.

56:41Doug Woodham: He'd go over and talk to them. That's a skill. Warhol was a smart bloke too. Whether he was gifted, I don't know, but he was a smart bloke.

56:49Felix Salmon: He was very smart.

56:50Doug Woodham: And not all artists are smart. They're intelligent, but being a one percenter from an intellect perspective, that's rare. Bosco, I think, was in that category. Oral, given just his effectiveness in navigating the world, you know, who knows?

57:05Felix Salmon: The most successful business people, as you know from your time at McKinsey, are rarely particularly intelligent.

57:11Doug Woodham: You know, it's actually the, maybe you'll vomit on this, but the venture capital investors tend to be profoundly intelligent. Lots of the folks who founded PE firms 10, 15, 20, 30 years ago, profoundly intelligent. They really took leaps. I mean, the most interesting people to spend time with generally are venture capitalists.

57:34Felix Salmon: Where would you, on that scale, where would you rate Jose Mugabe and Peter Brandt?

57:40Doug Woodham: They're up there. I mean, the two of them have become extraordinarily wealthy by dint of their actions in the art market. You know, dynastic wealth.

57:49Felix Salmon: They know what they're doing. And Jean-Michel was kind of the beneficiary.

57:53Doug Woodham: And his family and his two sisters. Look, his two sisters have inherited art and Basquiat-related businesses that, you know, they're among the wealthiest women in the United States. And so there's something wonderful about that.

58:05Felix Salmon: Good for them. Doug Woodham, thank you. Thank you for coming on to Money Talks. This has been absolutely enlightening. Your book is published by Thames & Hudson. It's out now. Remind us of the title. Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Making of an Icon.

58:21Doug Woodham: and I want to say we've only touched on like a handful of stories if you liked any of this there's just there's a lot more

58:28Felix Salmon: there's more so thanks for coming in thanks to Jessamyn Molly and Merit Jacob for producing and we'll be back on Saturday with a regular Slate Money