In 1982, at twenty-one years old, Basquiat signed with Mary Boone, whose Fifth Avenue gallery was then the most powerful commercial space in the New York art world — the room through which careers were validated, prices set, and the grammar of the 1980s primary market written. Boone, executed in 1983 at the height of that arrangement, responds to that economy with a question: what exactly is an icon, and how does one come to be made?

The visual answer is compressed into a single act of collage. Basquiat renders his dealer as the Mona Lisa — or dresses the Mona Lisa in the dealer's identity — the direction of the substitution deliberately unclear. Executed in paper collage, marker, and oilstick on a narrow vertical masonite panel, the support itself makes an argument. Masonite is industrial pressed wood, salvaged from a hardware store or the street — an unglamorous material made to bear a glamorous enterprise. Both figures are forms of brand: containers of accumulated cultural value, simultaneously impossible to see clearly and impossible to look away from. Basquiat turns Leonardo's most reproduced image — so thoroughly institutionalized it can barely be encountered as a painting — into a vehicle for examining his own position within art history and the commodity logic of the market he had entered.