“I had asked a lot of my friends who were artists to donate pieces as prizes alongside the small cash prizes we were giving,” Rosenthal recounted to Variety.
The story of Basquiat, as told admittedly by his friend and contemporary, is a parable of what happens to young artists when they’re sucked up into scenes just like this one, when the art world extends itself just far enough to pick up what’s new, remove them from their natural surroundings, and isolate them as geniuses.