A personal look at an artist's super-stardom
- January 31, 2010 19:30
Reviewed at Sundance, the new documentary "Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child," is a tender ode from one friend to another, but it's also another wheel in the hype machine that persists around the late, famed painter who blew apart the art scene in the 1980s. That it is both at the same time will complicate reaction to this talking-heads-heavy doc. The cautionary aspect of Basquiat's rise and fall was the suddenness of his fame, thrusting him from absolute poverty to multimillionaire status in little more than a year.