A Basquiat Blockbuster for an Artist on Whom Time Ran Out
‘King Pleasure’ sprawls, occupying an entire city block. Its size, ambition, and price tag are reminiscent of the Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit that landed on Manhattan’s piers this summer. Art snobs may groan. Tourists will flock.

Like its subject, “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure” is something of a middlebrow rebel. Its size and scope suggest a blockbuster museum exhibit, yet it is found not at one of Manhattan’s temples of culture but rather far to the city’s west, among avenues crowded with stylishly spare galleries.
Somewhere in between an art show, an event space, and a theme park, this “immersive exhibition” offers a bold revision to the Midtown mandarins and Meatpacking mavens who have long called the art world shots. More than a vision, “King Pleasure” is a vibe.
The show inhabits Starrett Lehigh, a 19-story edifice that began its life as a 1930s warehouse. Freed from space constraints and academic chaperoning, “King Pleasure” sprawls, occupying an entire city block. Its size, ambition, and price tag are reminiscent of the Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit that landed on Manhattan’s piers this summer. Art snobs may groan. Tourists will flock.
In a sign of the times the building now has its own slick website, which informs, “Creators and makers have long called Starrett-Lehigh home.” It seems likely that these “creators” and “makers” will flock to “King Pleasure,” and perhaps be joined there by Instagram influencers besides. The gift shop was closed during the press preview, but it looked well apportioned.
“King Pleasure” is a project of the Jean-Michel Basquiat Estate, and is a family affair. The show is organized by the late artist’s two sisters, and furnished with more than 200 of Basquiat’s unseen and rarely seen works, from juvenilia to the strident canvases of his later years. Recordings of Basquiat himself boom in the background, and “King Pleasure” delivers an undeniable intimacy with the artist. The catalog is gorgeous.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, who in 1960 was born to comfortable circumstances at Park Slope, lived only 28 years. His father was Haitian, his mother of Puerto Rican descent. He came of age as an artist in the hothouse of the Lower East Side in the 1970s, that cauldron where rap, punk music, and graffiti culture all alchemized. All of these contribute to the edge of his art.
Basquiat was a prodigy, appearing in a prestigious contemporary art exhibit in Germany at age 21 and at the Whitney Biennial at 22. One of his heroes was Andy Warhol, who was omnipresent in the Village in those days, and they soon became friends and collaborators. Basquiat even moved into a loft and studio owned by Warhol, at 27 Great Jones Street.
Even as he joined the ranks of luminaries like Warhol, Keith Haring, and dated Madonna before she was Madonna, he was stalked by demons. He partied hard, and there were always drugs. If there is one story of him selling a painting to buy heroin, there are a thousand. Toward the end, and especially after Warhol’s death, Basquiat was a recluse. He was found dead by his girlfriend.
In some senses, “King Pleasure” feels intimate. It provides minute reconstructions of his childhood home — both living room and kitchen — as well as of the Great Jones Street studio. A map of New York tracks nearly every place Basquiat frequented, from childhood to the Lower East Side, that served as professional muse and personal maw.
All of this naches has its drawbacks. “King Pleasure” is all pleasure, and none of the pain that is a key part of the Basquiat story. It presents his work as commentaries on race, but does not delve into what it meant to be a black artist at a time when the art world was overwhelmingly white.
In “King Pleasure,” there is very little sense of an ambient world at all. Basquiat worked and lived in a dense milieu of friends, lovers, and artistic influence. He first came on the scene as half of a graffiti duo known as “SAMO,” and even as he developed a voice, he did so in a context every bit as frothy as the Montparnasse in the years after World War I.
“King Pleasure” is nothing if not generous in its roster of work, but it lacks a true blockbuster, which is a product of the craze for the artist’s work that has fomented since his death. In 2017, a Basquiat painting, “Untitled,” sold for $110.5 million. In 2021, his work generated $439.6 million at auction, second only to Pablo Picasso. Basquiat was a distinctive artist, but he’s an even better business.
With these astronomical sums to focus the mind, it is worth taking a closer look at the art behind the myth. “Untitled” features a black skull set against a blue background. Its details are not minute but manic, as if it was scrawled on a subway wall before the police arrived. The messiness conveys both hurriedness and something like an artistic brainstorm. The impression is more young blood than Old Master.
There are a number of pieces in “King Pleasure” that linger in the mind. “Untitled (200 Dollars in Dimes)” features one of Basquiat’s trademark crowns drawn with an oilstick over plexiglass, with a list of words in the background. It feels somewhere between a notebook doodle and a tribute to a missing monarch, with the black and white composition suggesting an X-ray or a still from an early movie.
Another painting is “Dark Race Horse/ Jesse Owens,” from 1983. In black, golds, slashing reds, Basquiat depicts the leg of the Olympian who won gold in Munich in 1936. It is an anatomical sketch but also a portrait and an amputation.
“Kalik,” from 1988, employs a striking blue background across which is written “Death of Marat” alongside words like “Soap,” “Urine,” and “Fermentation,” suggesting a riff on Jacques-Louis David’s own “Death of Marat,” one of the iconic works of the 18th century. It is difficult to banish thoughts of, the same year “Kalik” was painted, Basquiat’s own domestic demise.
The most striking room in “King Pleasure” is the final one, a recreation of the Palladium, the legendary nightclub that was demolished by New York University in 1988, with a dormitory erected in its place. Basquiat painted for the VIP room at the club a large mural that was rescued and now appears here alongside photographs from its sceney heyday, behind a faux bar.
When I was there, it was clear that this space was going to be used for an event — the hors d’oeuvres were practically making their way onto napkins. I took a photograph in front of the mural, as thousands more will do in the weeks ahead. But there was no music and no sweating skin, no Warhol in his wig, and, worst of all, no Jean-Michel Basquiat, too young to know how little time he had left.