ABOVE: detail from Jean Michel Basquiat’s Future Science vs Man (1983)

The New Yorker is currently running on its website this quietly glowing review of the retrospective of Basquiat’s work that’s on right now at the Brooklyn Museum.

The show features over a hundred works by the brilliant and self-destructive young artist, who pumped out hundreds of paintings in under a decade and then died of a drug overdose in 1988. Peter Scheldahl’s review in The New Yorker touches on the live-fast-die-young ethos of Basquiat’s rockstar rise and fall but never slips into obit mode, focusing more on Basquiat’s genius for lines, something he honed as a graf artist before going legit (Banksy, do you hear?).

The Brooklyn Museum’s website also features a browser-crasherriffic mini-site aimed at angst-saturated teens, where they can scribble Basquianically on a little Flash™ canvas and then post the results for all to see and laugh at.

The New Yorker > The Critics > The Art World > Young Fun [nb: link will expire after about week, so read it now…]