In May 2017 a 1982 painting of a skull sold for 110.5 million dollars after a ten-minute bidding war. A few years before it was painted, the artist was a homeless teenager sleeping in Washington Square Park and selling postcards for a dollar. This episode examines how Jean-Michel Basquiat, born in Brooklyn in 1960 to a Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother, reading three languages by age eleven, rewired the contemporary art world in a single decade before dying of a heroin overdose at 27.

We trace the childhood car accident that put a copy of Gray’s Anatomy in his hands, his mother’s institutionalization, the SAMO graffiti campaign aimed at SoHo galleries, and the vertical launch from the 1980 Times Square Show to Documenta at 21 and the Whitney Biennial at 22. Along the way we unpack the three-peaked crown, the halos, the bebop-inspired crossed-out words, the painting Defacement made after Michael Stewart’s death, the intense bond with Andy Warhol, the critics who called him Warhol’s mascot, and the cognitive dissonance of a revolutionary funded by the aristocracy he critiqued.

• How a medical textbook and a removed spleen shaped a lifelong visual vocabulary
• Why the streets bypassed gatekeepers that would never let a Black teenager through the door
• The Polaroid and the two-hour double portrait that stunned Andy Warhol
• Cash hidden in books, paint-splattered Armani suits, and the pressure of an insatiable market
• Whether buying a Basquiat mug is hearing his critique or repeating the commodification he warned about