ABSTRACT
At the opening of the 1992 Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition at the Whitney Museum last fall, I wandered through the crowd talking to the folks about the art. I had just one question. It was about emotional responses to the work. I asked, what did people feel looking at Basquiat’s paintings? No one I talked with answered the question. They went off on tangents, said what they liked about him, recalled meetings, generally talked about the show, but something seemed to stand in the way, preventing them from spontaneously articulating feelings the work evoked. If art moves us, touches our spirit, it is not easily forgotten. Images will reappear in our heads against our will. I often think that many of the works that are canonically labeled “great” are
simply those that lingered longest in individual memory. And that they lingered because while looking at them someone was moved, touched, taken to another place, momentarily born again.
