An entire exhibition of Jean-Michel Basquiats all owned by one man leads to the question: \u201cWhy Basquiat?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDid you walk in this room and smile?\u201d Kenneth C. Griffin responded, motioning to the nine massive Basquiat paintings around us inside the P\u00e9rez Art Museum Miami (known as PAMM).<\/p>\n
Griffin, founder and chief executive of the $68 billion Citadel hedge fund<\/a>, has lent the nine canvases and a sculpture to PAMM for \u201cBasquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols,\u201d<\/a> an exhibition that opens to the public on Thursday. All 10 works were purchased by Griffin just over the last few years for a sum he confirmed as approximately $500 million.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a haul that includes the most expensive Basquiat ever sold at auction: Depicting a screaming skull, the untitled painting was bought at Sotheby\u2019s in 2017 for $110.5 million<\/a> by the Japanese fashion mogul Yusaku Maezawa. Griffin, in turn, bought the painting privately from Maezawa, for what Artnet reported was $200 million. Now, standing in front of it at PAMM, Griffin declined to comment on the price. But he did say Maezawa wouldn\u2019t part with the work easily: \u201cThis was a multiyear dance.\u201d And what finally closed the deal? \u201cProbably his just feeling like I bothered him too much,\u201d Griffin quipped.<\/p>\n Still, when we spoke just before the show opened, Griffin insisted that his going all in on Basquiat was no financial play. \u201cI invest in stocks, I have the joy in life of being able to buy art,\u201d he said. His collecting ethos is simple: Look for work with a visceral \u201cwow\u201d factor that immediately \u201cprovokes an emotional response\u201d and then \u201ctakes you one step deeper,\u201d he said. \u201cIt forces contemplation or introspection. I think Basquiat\u2019s works do a great job of checking all three of those boxes.\u201d<\/p>\n At that, Megan Kincaid<\/a>, the curator of Griffin\u2019s collection and co-curator of the PAMM show, walked over and playfully poked fun at Griffin\u2019s explanation. She nodded to a Basquiat hung nearby, \u201cPez Dispenser,\u201d a six-foot-tall cartoonlike painting from 1984 of a Tyrannosaurus rex topped by one of the artist\u2019s signature crowns. \u201cKen will buy anything with a dinosaur in it,\u201d she teased as Griffin threw up his hands in mock horror. \u201cDon\u2019t say that!\u201d he gasped.<\/p>\n Indeed, Griffin has already bagged one of the most complete dinosaur fossils in existence, a 150-million-year-old stegosaurus skeleton that\u2019s 27 feet long<\/a>. It was purchased for $43.2 million and is on exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History<\/a> in New York.<\/p>\n This unorthodox item in Griffin\u2019s collection of art and artifacts joins marquee paintings by Paul C\u00e9zanne, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock<\/a>, along with two original printings of the U.S. Constitution<\/a>, and copies of the 13th Amendment and of the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln.<\/p>\n Griffin also seems to collect residential properties the way some people chase down baseball cards. Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City recently shot a short video<\/a> in front of Griffin\u2019s $238 million Manhattan pied-\u00e0-terre, singling out the entrepreneur as a reason for a special tax on \u201cthe richest of the rich.\u201d After the video went viral, Griffin fired back, calling it \u201ccreepy and weird\u201d and \u201cfrightening.\u201d<\/a> A Wall Street Journal article tallying his dizzying number of homes, from the Hamptons to Hawaii, was titled simply \u201cKen Griffin Buys the World.\u201d<\/p>\n That summation was before he left Chicago<\/a> in 2022, citing soaring crime and taxes. He relocated to Miami, where he purchased a nearly $107 million waterfront estate and began construction on a new 52-story headquarters for Citadel. This Basquiat show at PAMM marks his coming out as a major player on the Miami art scene.<\/p>\n However, Griffin insisted that the dizzying sums of money trading hands over Basquiats were a distraction. \u201cIf you\u2019re thinking about art just as, What\u2019s the price tag on that painting, you\u2019re missing the point. It should be: What\u2019s it make you feel?\u201d<\/p>\n The Museums Special Section<\/p>\n Now 57, he admitted he wasn\u2019t seriously exposed to art until he was in his late 20s, though he has enjoyed getting up to speed since then. Still, he joked that he might need some help if our discussion delved too deeply into aesthetics: \u201cCan I get a lifeline?\u201d he asked me, before hollering out to a cluster of people nearby, \u201c\u2018Can I get a lifeline?\u2019 What TV show is that from?\u201d There was an awkward silence until one of his Citadel executives flashed a grin and answered: \u201cWho Wants to Be a Millionaire.\u201d<\/p>\n It can certainly be hard to untangle the relationship between the work of Basquiat and a skyrocketing art market. The two have been intertwined since the start of his career at the dawn of the \u201980s. Nearly four decades on from his death, Basquiat\u2019s grip on both the art world and the popular imagination is stronger than ever. Aside from essentially replacing Pablo Picasso as a blue-chip barometer, Basquiat has become ubiquitous, from Tiffany\u2019s advertising campaigns<\/a> to the jerseys<\/a> of the Brooklyn Nets.<\/p>\n Franklin Sirmans, the director of PAMM<\/a> and co-curator of \u201cBasquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols,\u201d has spent his adult life exploring that phenomenon. He wrote his 1991 senior thesis at Wesleyan University on the artist, contributed to the catalog for the Whitney Museum of American Art\u2019s Basquiat retrospective in 1992, and co-curated a retrospective<\/a> of the artist for the Brooklyn Museum<\/a> in 2005. For Sirmans, as a teenager in the \u201980s, Basquiat \u201chad everything that a young kid in that moment, growing up outside of New York City, was fascinated by. It was poetry, it was music, it was fashion.\u201d<\/p>\n He still feels that way about Basquiat today. Accordingly, the sudden arrival in town of a Basquiat-buying billionaire did not escape his radar. In November 2024, at PAMM\u2019s annual gala, he publicly announced a $10 million donation from Griffin. As reported by Bloomberg, the real estate developer Jorge P\u00e9rez, a key donor of PAMM, after whom it is named, toasted Griffin by wryly reminding him, \u201cWe still have a lot of empty walls\u201d where Griffin\u2019s Basquiats \u201cwould look so beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n About 19 months later, Sirmans found himself standing over the uncrating of Basquiats in PAMM\u2019s freshly christened Kenneth C. Griffin Gallery. And looking at Basquiats up close is absolutely the best way to appreciate them, he explained.<\/p>\n Case in point: Basquiat\u2019s \u201cPez Dispenser.\u201d The image has been licensed by the artist\u2019s estate for everything from dinner plates to skateboard decks. \u201cBut when you get in front of it,\u201d Sirmans said, the work \u201cshows visuals underneath the skin of the first layer of painting that I never saw before, words that were gone over in a way more obfuscating than you thought you knew.\u201d By comparison, \u201cthere\u2019s no way you can see that in a reproduction.\u201d<\/p>\n Some of that revealed text speaks to Basquiat\u2019s own ambivalence about his place in the art world, as writ large throughout a Miami exhibition staged as a companion to the PAMM show at the nearby Bonnier Gallery<\/a>.<\/p>\n The gallery\u2019s director, Grant Bonnier, has gathered almost 100 drawings, early collages and smaller works, including many where Basquiat puts his own practice under a magnifying glass \u2014 most pointedly in the form of a three-foot slab<\/a> of wood featuring an image of the Mona Lisa. But the work is hardly a salute. She has been given a black eye and garish clown lipstick, and written prominently underneath is \u201cBOONE\u201d \u2014 a nod to Basquiat\u2019s tortured business relationship with his onetime dealer Mary Boone.<\/p>\n By several accounts, those sour feelings became mutual. In fact, by the time Basquiat died in 1988, many top art dealers felt that working with him was more trouble than it was financially worth. Critical judgments were similarly mixed, and the bottom of his art market fell out in the early \u201990s. Basquiat\u2019s auction sale total in 1989 was about $27 million in today\u2019s dollars; in 1991, it totaled less than a tenth of that.<\/p>\n \u201cNobody in their right mind at that point in time would have ever imagined that he would become this iconic figure,\u201d recalled Doug Woodham<\/a>, a financial adviser, a former Christie\u2019s president and the author of \u201cJean-Michel Basquiat: The Making of an Icon\u201d (2025). Instead, as Woodham writes in his book, three key collectors \u2014 Peter Brant, Jose Mugrabi and Enrico Navarra \u2014 spent the \u201990s keeping Basquiat\u2019s deflated prices from falling any further by buying heavily at both auctions and from other collectors. They also created traveling exhibitions of Basquiats to nurture the artist\u2019s critical reputation. It was a long-term bet that paid off handsomely. As Woodham wrote, Mugrabi told him that Brant bought the 1982 Basquiat painting \u201cBoy and Dog in a Johnnypump\u201d<\/a> for $1 million in late 1998. In mid-2020, Brant sold that same painting to Griffin \u2014 with Mugrabi\u2019s son acting as a broker alongside the dealer Larry Gagosian \u2014 for $115 million. (Griffin declined to comment on the price.)<\/p>\n