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- [00:00]
Doug Woodham
Foreign.
- [00:12]
Felix Salmon
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 feeling. I'm Felix Salmon 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?
- [00:40]
Doug 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 and I have a financial advisory business in New York now that works with big collectors. Before that, my professional life was really one of being a partner with McKinsey and Company.
- [01:07]
Felix Salmon
You escaped McKinsey to go into. To go into us.
- [01:11]
Doug Woodham
Yeah. There's a detour or two along the way, but yeah. So I sort of have a business and strategy mind that's actually perfect.
- [01:20]
Felix Salmon
But the main. But the reason you're on the show, to get to the point is you have written a book and the name.
- [01:24]
Doug Woodham
Of the book is Jean Michel Basquiat, the Making of an Icon.
- [01:29]
Felix Salmon
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 Low, the Malaysian fugitive. There's a lot to cover. It's all coming up on Money Talks.
- [02:03]
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- [02:49]
Felix 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 scenester, 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. 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?
- [04:04]
Doug Woodham
I think certainly over the past 15 years. Absolutely. Because look, 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 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, as we say.
- [04:42]
Felix Salmon
In the trade transl.
- [04:45]
Doug 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.
- [04:56]
Felix Salmon
Narrative and demand for it goes up rather than down. If you, 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.
- [05:09]
Doug Woodham
Exactly. And I guess a non art world analogy, just like what's been going on with Birkin bags and other luxury items, some of the, you know, fashion houses drastically increased prices and it didn't have a deleterious impact immediately on the number of sales they did, but it's starting to catch up with them.
- [05:27]
Felix Salmon
And we've ascertained that one of the reasons why people are buying Basquiats is because they're expensive. Insofar as Basquiat's status as this pop culture icon, you know, he's, 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 all of the sort of aura of his personal story. How does that play into his values over time?
- [05:59]
Doug 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.
- [06:08]
Felix 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 Basquiats 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, right, which is where often in the art world, when people make more 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.
- [06:51]
Doug Woodham
Right, exactly. So when he died in 1988, I think the highest price that his gallerist sold a work for was $30,000. Now that was in 1988 sums or 1987 sums. So you can, you know, price adjust it so 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 any more. 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. 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, you know, 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.
- [08:01]
Felix Salmon
And as an auctioneer, you know this better than anyone. If you go, 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 Basquiats, which were, to a first approximation, unsellable for some years.
- [08:33]
Doug 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. 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. 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. And collectors, they weren't persuaded necessarily by those things.
- [09:26]
Felix Salmon
And even Warhol was having a bit of a market lull in those years.
- [09:29]
Doug Woodham
Yes, Warhol's market. Look, in the second half of the 1980s, Warhol's market was in the doldrums.
- [09:37]
Felix 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, 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.
- [10:02]
Doug Woodham
Absolutely, absolutely. 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 of his work. 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.
- [10:28]
Felix 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 inanna nose and then maybe moves up a notch to a big gallery like Bruno Buschellsberger and then moves up a notch in terms of institutional imprimatur, 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. So I therefore need to buy this artist. And it's a sort of institution. First critical reception, first market, second kind of sequence. Is that what happened with Basquiat?
- [11:23]
Doug Woodham
No, not at all. So 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 work. So that sort of institutional notion actually didn't work with Basquiat in the early 1990s.
- [11:47]
Felix 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.
- [12:12]
Doug Woodham
Yeah. So in the 1980s, he was one of a couple handfuls of artists who were part of what was called the Neo Expressionist movement.
- [12:19]
Felix Salmon
The other one that everyone will have heard of is Julian Schnabel, who went on to make a movie about Basquiat.
- [12:25]
Doug Woodham
So 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.
- [12:44]
Felix 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.
- [12:49]
Doug Woodham
Correct, Right. 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.
- [13:01]
Felix Salmon
This is the beginning of, like, Jeffrey Deitch and, like, artisan asset class and all of this kind of stuff.
- [13:06]
Doug Woodham
Right. So by the time Basquiat died, and certainly after that 18 months 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.
- [13:39]
Felix Salmon
He seemed to kind of or was it just that thing about the 80s? Because the 80s were just a terrible decade in many ways. And people would look at him like they might look at Peter Halley and just be kind of like, that's just dated.
- [13:51]
Doug 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.
- [13:59]
Felix Salmon
Is that a lot realism?
- [14:00]
Doug Woodham
That's a lot. A thousand works. Thousand paintings was a lot. 2000 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.
- [14:21]
Felix Salmon
Does the Whitney retrospective have a bunch of bad Basquiat in it?
- [14:25]
Doug Woodham
They were very selective. They over sampled on the early work.
- [14:30]
Felix Salmon
The early work is always better, right?
- [14:32]
Doug Woodham
Actually the work for from sort of 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 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 Basquiat 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. And these three folks were the ones who prevented Basquiat's prices from falling even more.
- [15:36]
Felix 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 a lot of Basquiats, 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.
- [15:55]
Doug Woodham
Yeah, because look, you know, these were all wealthy people. Well, two of them in particular. One was more of a working man, 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.
- [16:09]
Felix Salmon
So who were these three men? And were they what you would call spec capital?
- [16:15]
Doug 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, Jose Magrobi. Jose Magrobi 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. 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's 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, 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. 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 US in any meaningful way. 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.
- [19:02]
Felix 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.
- [19:09]
Doug 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, 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. 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.
- [20:08]
Felix 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.
- [20:37]
Doug 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.
- [21:12]
Felix 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 Jean Michel'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 Mugrabi was, like Navarro was, like Randt was, part of what you do is you get to know everyone. You try and work out where everything is, what, 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. 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. Is the Basquiat market?
- [22:29]
Doug 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 resumes, 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.
- [23:10]
Felix 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 whose hell for, you know, $100 million for a painting, there are very few major works in museums. What's up with that?
- [23:50]
Doug Woodham
So when he was alive, the only museum that actually the museum had the. Had the most Basquiats was the Israel Museum. Randomly, they had two paintings. So bought one painting in 1982 by a young curator who met Hernita Noze 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 this 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 were interested in buying. 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 kit is relevant. And so part of the reason why Jose Magrabbe, Peter Brandt, and Enrico Navarro are so important, they hoovered up most of the available work. And they also started to create. Create packaged shows, particularly Enrico Navara and Jose Magrobi packaged shows of Basquiat's work that they started offering to museums around the world.
- [25:13]
Felix 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 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. In the 90s and the 2000s would be in the sort of donating zone right now, not. Not really happening so much.
- [25:41]
Doug 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. It's. 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.
- [26:10]
Felix 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 value that it might fetch in the secondary Market.
- [26:27]
Doug Woodham
Yeah, well, you still need to get a fair market value appraisal, so you.
- [26:29]
Felix Salmon
Can, you can probably find that.
- [26:31]
Doug Woodham
Yeah, well, you. 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. A 30, 40, $50 million painting, you know, 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. So it's interesting. There are really only two places in the world where you can go and see Basquiat works. One is the broad Museum in LA. 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 open 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. I mean, they've just seen it in pictures.
- [27:54]
Felix Salmon
I mean, it does reproduce very well. But by the same token, as you detail in the book, getting permission to reproduce these works is decidedly non trivial.
- [28:05]
Doug Woodham
Yeah, they reproduce well, but Basiat 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 12ft, it's more of an immersive experience. I mean, Basquiat, there are lots of Basquiat paintings that are 10 by 12ft. You know, the 8 by 10ft, 6 by 6ft. 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 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.
- [29:48]
Felix Salmon
One of the interesting things about 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 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. 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 in a children's book.
- [30:59]
Doug Woodham
Yes, 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 is 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.
- [31:26]
Felix Salmon
He went to St. Ann's School in Brooklyn, which is a place where intellectually gifted kids get all of the nurturing and education they need.
- [31:34]
Doug Woodham
He was a 1 percenter. And I spent a lot of time talking to all of the gifted children, 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 7 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. 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 he, I think, understanding Basquiat, 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. 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.
- [33:03]
Felix Salmon
Right. 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 an Ina nose's 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.
- [33:37]
Doug Woodham
Exactly. I really emphasize this intellectual giftedness because again, 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 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. I mean, look, collectors, the people who are spending money buying art, they're business people. I mean, in the U.S. historically, it hasn't been legacy money. It's not a bunch of philanthropy types or trust fund cases. It's 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.
- [34:33]
Felix 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.
- [34:49]
Doug Woodham
Yeah, I'm sure there was a black collector. I actually talked to Anina Nozay 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.
- [35:21]
Felix 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.
- [35:37]
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- [36:06]
Felix Salmon
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- [38:37]
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- [39:13]
Felix 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 Brant and Navarro coming together. And again, the causality here is not obvious, but there's certainly a correlation, if not a causation, that 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. 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?
- [40:18]
Doug 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 package 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. 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 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 shout out to.
- [41:27]
Felix Salmon
Jeffrey Wright, who plays Basquiat, great actor.
- [41:32]
Doug Woodham
Really terrific in it. 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 drives lots of people's thinking about who's an interesting artist and why. But Basquiat became sort of the Black artist that many people thought they should.
- [42:22]
Felix Salmon
Own almost to a full certainly. You know, when I was 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.
- [42:49]
Doug Woodham
Exactly. 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 US he was upwardly mobile. He was an accountant. You know, the notion of voodoo and Haiti is sort of hysterical if you know anything about Basquiat's dad. But look, people sort of of think that they used to, but not.
- [43:10]
Felix Salmon
We've grown out of that now.
- [43:12]
Doug Woodham
Yes.
- [43:14]
Felix Salmon
So a few years ago, we had the authors of Billion Dollar Whale on this show.
- [43:19]
Doug Woodham
Oh, terrific, terrific.
- [43:20]
Felix Salmon
The billion Dollar whale being this guy, Jho Low, 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 Low 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 gonna, like, die on this hill.
- [43:56]
Doug Woodham
Well, I think it's true.
- [43:59]
Felix Salmon
So I will let you have it, but only if it's true.
- [44:03]
Doug Woodham
Yeah, yeah. So for people who look, Jho Low, Malaysian fraudster, went to British boarding schools, went to Wharton for college, 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. You know, lots of countries do that.
- [44:33]
Felix 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 Basquiats rather than infrastructure projects.
- [44:45]
Doug 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, Jho Low, as a sort of baby face 20 something, became a darling in New York, buying beautiful apartments in the Time Warner 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.
- [45:16]
Felix 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?
- [45:32]
Doug Woodham
Paid like $48 million, which is a.
- [45:35]
Felix Salmon
Lot of money, even for Joe Lowe.
- [45:37]
Doug Woodham
Because the previous auction record had been, I think at that point in time was like 22 or 25 million dollars. 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 Swizz beats were in the skybox with Jho Low when he was buying this painting and when it sold for that price. And I was at Christie's at that point in time, so 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. They started pounding on the window. And I remember the whole audience, like 700 people in the audience, like, peering up, wondering, why, 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, 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. Gotta 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. 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, like, wouldn't that stop people from buying? It just. It drew attention and it 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. A year later, another painting sells for like 50 million to a Japanese tech entrepreneur. 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 Jho Low 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.
- [47:52]
Felix Salmon
One of the interesting themes of, 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, that there's no Jean Michel Basquiat Foundation. No, no one ever set up like a nonprofit entity to look after anything. As you say, the de facto catalogue raisonne was very much a for profit project by one of Basquiat's collectors. 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 autistic stays.
- [48:50]
Doug Woodham
I think that's true. The only hesitation you're hearing in 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, shows, et cetera. 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 had never divorced but were deeply estranged from each other, inherited 171 Paintings by Basquiat and about a thousand drawings. And they also inherited a bunch of works by Warhol and a few other artists. Basquiat didn't trade that much art with people. You know, he had a James Van Der Zee photograph or two, but not. He just basically had 20 Warhols. So Gerard, I think seeing what Magrabbe, Peter Brandt, Enrico Navarro were doing, it was like, oh my God, I shouldn't sell this because this is probably going to be worse, 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. And he became very enamored with how Keith Haring, both in his lifetime and Keith Haring's foundation after he died, used licenses to generate revenue to be able to pay the insurance premiums on the art they owned, to do books, et cetera. 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 box. 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. 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. It has not hurt his career, 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 to 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. Licensing that the Basquiat estate has done, or the Herring estate, but it hasn't hurt his market impression. 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.
- [51:55]
Felix 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.
- [52:07]
Doug Woodham
Oh yeah.
- [52:08]
Felix Salmon
And its subsequent appearance in a major ad campaign featuring Jay Z and Beyonce, which you describe as being remarkably ostentatious and vulgar.
- [52:18]
Doug Woodham
Yeah, Tiffany's bought this Basquiat painting that has a blue background that has this sort of uncanny resemblance to the Tiffany blue. They try 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 Basquiat behind. 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 and, you know, sometimes there's a little box and you'll open and there's a piece of candy. I think it's how it's 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 their asking price was $150,000.
- [53:29]
Felix Salmon
To be clear about this, I think you say that they paid. Paid 20 odd million dollars for the painting.
- [53:35]
Doug Woodham
I didn't get the exact price, but it was in the vicinity of 20 in the neighborhood.
- [53:39]
Felix 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 that 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 Basquiats that you can see in New York City.
- [53:54]
Doug Woodham
Absolutely, absolutely. And it's a great Basquiat painting.
- [53:57]
Felix Salmon
And. 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 air almost more than they needed the painting itself.
- [54:22]
Doug Woodham
That's a good point.
- [54:23]
Felix Salmon
So my question for you is, which one cost them more, the rights or the painting?
- [54:29]
Doug 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. There's no way they spent $20 million on the licensing fee. I mean, if they even spent a million dollars, I'd be surprised, but pure speculation.
- [54:48]
Felix Salmon
On my word, the market is interesting that way because in a way, like, the object is nice, it looks pretty, and a flagship store, but it's the ability to put it in glossy ads in magazines that really gives it value to its current owner.
- [55:05]
Doug 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 Beyonce and Jay Z are because Jay Z's sitting in a chair looking up at Beyonce. 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. It's not anything that anybody would have really have ever seen before. But stylistically, you sort of think that it's a boss. To me, it was just so emblematic of just how he had become this pop culture icon.
- [55:57]
Felix 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 Pasquiat has.
- [56:13]
Doug Woodham
The only one that's sort of in that cat are Frida Kahlo, because she's just so well known.
- [56:18]
Felix Salmon
She had her own movie as well, but I feel like she's kind of getting, you know, Leonora Carrington is coming up behind him and stealing her thunder.
- [56:27]
Doug Woodham
The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston is doing a Frida Kahlo retrospective. It's called the Making of an Icon. No way.
- [56:35]
Felix Salmon
They stole your book title. How dare they?
- [56:38]
Doug Woodham
But to just sort of summarize the arc of things. So, again, what were the forces and factors behind wall? 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. You know, a second thing was the movie that really pushed him outside the bounds of the art world into the public domain. Third was his dad, who was just such a strategic marketer and manager of the estate. And then 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. And it also just. Many of the early paintings, they're just profoundly interesting. They're beautiful, they're interesting, they're wonderful to look at. And so I, I do think he's an enormous talent.
- [57:46]
Felix Salmon
It helps if you're good.
- [57:46]
Doug Woodham
It really helps if you're good. But good is not a sufficient condition.
- [57:51]
Felix Salmon
It's necessary, but not sufficient. So I think just to finish up, the obvious question I think people are gonna 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 God, yes. Jim Morrison or Rambo or Jesus, you.
- [58:10]
Doug Woodham
Know, in a sense, we're not seeing an overweight 65 year old Basquiat regaling you with stories in the bar. And I remember Onino. No, 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. It's also, what do you think he'd.
- [58:48]
Felix Salmon
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.
- [59:03]
Doug 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 and wanted to become a writer. I mean, he loved Beat Generation, he loved Burroughs.
- [59:27]
Felix Salmon
Really into Kerouac. Right? That was his.
- [59:29]
Doug Woodham
Really into Kerouac, which is like Kerouac is. Is for me, it's impossible to read. I mean, it's just. It's just I've tried so many times, like. 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, 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, 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 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 years. 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, probably be on the beach, sitting.
- [60:30]
Felix Salmon
By the pool in Beverly Hills.
- [60:31]
Doug Woodham
Yeah, I think, I think. Right. I think he liked fashion. He was actually somewhat of a shy guy and very fragile guy. You know, from talking to his friends, I always imagined him as being a. More. More boisterous, outgoing, fill the room guy. He was a much more hesitant, you know, he was able, not.
- [60:49]
Felix Salmon
Not unlike Andy, you know.
- [60:51]
Doug Woodham
That's a good point. That's a good point. Actually, one. One of his girlfriends said, you look, he had this great skill. He could be in a room with 50 people and he could figure out who are the two or three coolest people in the room.
- [61:01]
Felix Salmon
Andy, he'd go over.
- [61:02]
Doug 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. And not all artists are smart like they're intelligent. But being a 1 percenter, you know, from an intellect perspective, that's rare. Ozia, I think, was in that category. Warhol, given just his effectiveness in navigating the world, you know, who knows?
- [61:26]
Felix Salmon
The most successful business people, as you know from your time at McKinsey, are rarely particularly intelligent.
- [61:32]
Doug Woodham
You know, it's interesting, 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 capital.
- [61:55]
Felix Salmon
Where would you. On that scale, where would you rate Jose Mugrabi and Peter Brandt?
- [62:00]
Doug 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.
- [62:10]
Felix Salmon
They know what they're doing. And Jean Michel was the. Was kind of the beneficiary.
- [62:14]
Doug Woodham
And his family and his two sisters, look, his two sisters have inherited art and Boscat related businesses that, you know, they're among the wealthy women in the United States. And so there's something wonderful about that.
- [62:26]
Felix Salmon
Good for them, man. Doug Woodham. Thank you. Thank you for coming onto Money Talks. This has been absolutely enlightening. Your book is published by Thames and Hudson. It's out now. Remind us of the title, Jean Michel.
- [62:39]
Doug Woodham
Basquiat, the Making of an Icon. And I want to say we've only touched on a handful of stories. If you liked any of this, there's just, there's a lot more.
- [62:48]
Felix 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. Slate Money is sponsored this week by Saks. Saks Fifth Avenue makes it easy to shop for your personal style this season. Fall is here and there are are so many new fall arrivals that you're going to want to wear again and again. There's a great new relaxed Prada blazer. There are Gucci loafers you can take from work to the weekend. It is incredibly Easy to visit Saks.com and find new arrivals from your favorite designers. I kind of love the shirts from Comme des Garcons. I can't always afford them, but it is definitely always there on my Inspo board. And once in a blue moon I might even buy one. Saks makes shopping feel customized to you. They have in store stylists. They have Saks.com showing you only what you like to shop. They will even let you know when arrivals from your favorite designers are in or when something you love is back in stock. So find inspiration for your personal style every day at Saks Fifth Avenue.