🍷 Flavour Profile
Primary Notes: Sharp notes of confusion
Secondary Notes: Dominant tones of volcanic emotional urgency
Tertiary Notes: Lingering traces of child-like defiance, unresolved judgement
📜 Provenance
🍽️ Medium: Painting (Oil stick, photocopy collage)
👤 By: Jean-Michel Basquiat
📍 Where I Found It: Museum of Modern Art, New York City
🍷 Tasting Notes
I have always been both intimidated by and passionate about talking about art in its various forms. I remain in love with the inevitability of the human tendency to create beautiful things. So when I saw Glenn by Basquiat at MoMA on a casual, chilly spring afternoon, I was met with immediate confusion.
I have always had a skepticism toward certain forms of contemporary art, which self-admittedly comes from a significantly under-trained and uneducated eye, but also from the known fact that, with famous contemporary artists, market value and institutional prestige can often distort perception.
Considering that this year I wanted to be more intentional about how I consume art in all its many forms — learning from different mediums and styles — Basquiat’s Glenn felt like a perfect friend.
My first question upon witnessing it was why the art felt like someone had seen a bunch of old scrap paper lying around and used that as their canvas. Sitting with that feeling, I thought about how I write amateur poetry when I am inspired to do so. Inspiration and emotion feel a lot like something bubbling under the surface until, at one point, a volcanic eruption becomes inevitable.
I imagined Basquiat walking through a random floor in a building under construction, with old newspapers laid out beneath him, when, completely unexpectedly, all the emotion threatens to burst out of him. At that point, there is no plan, no blank canvas — only what must be said. And it will be said whenever, wherever, on whatever surface can hold it.
Next I notice what immediate stands out as an unaesthetic large mask made alive with unpleasant emotion. Looking closer, I see sharp red lines emerging from the mouth which makes me think this mask is angry. While my initial reaction was “why is this famous?”, marinating in that discomfort of not knowing what the artist was trying to say but also not understanding the brilliance, I uncovered a personal bias: I assumed “serious art” should be polished, academically trained, and visually pleasing. However, in retrospect, that is about as ridiculous as saying a film is only good if it has a happy ending.
This allowed me to witness the child-like style in a new lens – as something that was potentially deliberate defiance. It began to read as a rejection of elitism and classism and many of the traditional barriers around art – the very things that kept me from developing and expressing my thoughts about art in the first place.
Maybe that is the genius of the self-taught artist from 1980s Brooklyn. Maybe he is saying art can be ugly because life can be ugly. Maybe like Wordsworth and the Romantics – he is breaking down the confines we box ourselves into with the rules on what is considered beautiful.
✨ The Finish
🕯️ What Stayed: Art can be ugly because life can be ugly
💬 If you asked me: I am not sure if I saw the genius yet, but I know I witnessed something that made me curious enough to want to learn his language more.
🏷️ Vintage
Created: 1984
The Big Smokey Apple 