An entire exhibition of Jean-Michel Basquiats all owned by one man leads to the question: "Why Basquiat?"
"Did you walk in this room and smile?" Kenneth C. Griffin responded, motioning to the nine massive Basquiat paintings around us inside the Pérez Art Museum Miami (known as PAMM).
Griffin, founder and chief executive of the $68 billion Citadel hedge fund, has lent the nine canvases and a sculpture to PAMM for "Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols," 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.
It's a haul that includes the most expensive Basquiat ever sold at auction: Depicting a screaming skull, the untitled painting was bought at Sotheby's in 2017 for $110.5 million 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't part with the work easily: "This was a multiyear dance." And what finally closed the deal? "Probably his just feeling like I bothered him too much," Griffin quipped.
Still, when we spoke just before the show opened, Griffin insisted that his going all in on Basquiat was no financial play. "I invest in stocks, I have the joy in life of being able to buy art," he said. His collecting ethos is simple: Look for work with a visceral "wow" factor that immediately "provokes an emotional response" and then "takes you one step deeper," he said. "It forces contemplation or introspection. I think Basquiat's works do a great job of checking all three of those boxes."
At that, Megan Kincaid, the curator of Griffin's collection and co-curator of the PAMM show, walked over and playfully poked fun at Griffin's explanation. She nodded to a Basquiat hung nearby, "Pez Dispenser," a six-foot-tall cartoonlike painting from 1984 of a Tyrannosaurus rex topped by one of the artist's signature crowns. "Ken will buy anything with a dinosaur in it," she teased as Griffin threw up his hands in mock horror. "Don't say that!" he gasped.
Indeed, Griffin has already bagged one of the most complete dinosaur fossils in existence, a 150-million-year-old stegosaurus skeleton that's 27 feet long. It was purchased for $43.2 million and is on exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
This unorthodox item in Griffin's collection of art and artifacts joins marquee paintings by Paul Cézanne, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, along with two original printings of the U.S. Constitution, and copies of the 13th Amendment and of the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln.
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 in front of Griffin's $238 million Manhattan pied-à-terre, singling out the entrepreneur as a reason for a special tax on "the richest of the rich." After the video went viral, Griffin fired back, calling it "creepy and weird" and "frightening." A Wall Street Journal article tallying his dizzying number of homes, from the Hamptons to Hawaii, was titled simply "Ken Griffin Buys the World."
That summation was before he left Chicago 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.
However, Griffin insisted that the dizzying sums of money trading hands over Basquiats were a distraction. "If you're thinking about art just as, What's the price tag on that painting, you're missing the point. It should be: What's it make you feel?"
Now 57, he admitted he wasn't 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: "Can I get a lifeline?" he asked me, before hollering out to a cluster of people nearby, "'Can I get a lifeline?' What TV show is that from?" There was an awkward silence until one of his Citadel executives flashed a grin and answered: "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire."
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 '80s. Nearly four decades on from his death, Basquiat's 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's advertising campaigns to the jerseys of the Brooklyn Nets.
Franklin Sirmans, the director of PAMM and co-curator of "Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols," 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's Basquiat retrospective in 1992, and co-curated a retrospective of the artist for the Brooklyn Museum in 2005. For Sirmans, as a teenager in the '80s, Basquiat "had 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."
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's annual gala, he publicly announced a $10 million donation from Griffin. As reported by Bloomberg, the real estate developer Jorge Pérez, a key donor of PAMM, after whom it is named, toasted Griffin by wryly reminding him, "We still have a lot of empty walls" where Griffin's Basquiats "would look so beautiful."
About 19 months later, Sirmans found himself standing over the uncrating of Basquiats in PAMM's freshly christened Kenneth C. Griffin Gallery. And looking at Basquiats up close is absolutely the best way to appreciate them, he explained.
Case in point: Basquiat's "Pez Dispenser." The image has been licensed by the artist's estate for everything from dinner plates to skateboard decks. "But when you get in front of it," Sirmans said, the work "shows 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." By comparison, "there's no way you can see that in a reproduction."
Some of that revealed text speaks to Basquiat's 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.
The gallery's 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 - most pointedly in the form of a three-foot slab 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 "BOONE" - a nod to Basquiat's tortured business relationship with his onetime dealer Mary Boone.
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 '90s. Basquiat's auction sale total in 1989 was about $27 million in today's dollars; in 1991, it totaled less than a tenth of that.
"Nobody in their right mind at that point in time would have ever imagined that he would become this iconic figure," recalled Doug Woodham, a financial adviser, a former Christie's president and the author of "Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Making of an Icon" (2025). Instead, as Woodham writes in his book, three key collectors - Peter Brant, Jose Mugrabi and Enrico Navarra - spent the '90s keeping Basquiat's 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's 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 "Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump"for $1 million in late 1998. In mid-2020, Brant sold that same painting to Griffin - with Mugrabi's son acting as a broker alongside the dealer Larry Gagosian - for $115 million. (Griffin declined to comment on the price.)
At PAMM, Griffin is quick to credit a 2019 exhibition of Basquiats at Brant's private museum in New York as his inspiration. "I've obviously seen his works over the years, one here, one there," Griffin said, but seeing so many key paintings all together under one roof had a powerful effect on him. "I'm interested in living with and having built a collection that I think we will look back on and say that it represents some of the most iconic works of humanity in the history of art, because the collection stretches all the way back to da Vinci." Just as crucially, after his three children each pick a few favorites, he expects the bulk of his collection to eventually land at public institutions, though he wouldn't name specific museums.
"How do you inspire the next generation to be creative, to step outside their comfort zone and to grow as people?" Griffin mused. "I do think that art plays a really important part in that story, and I do think Basquiat does a really great job of exploring issues of race, of power, of wealth."
I asked Griffin if art did just that for him as a kid. "No," he answered bluntly. "And I think I really missed something in that. I'm not angry or bitter about that," he added, having grown up largely in suburban Boca Raton. "I grew up in parts of the country where there just wasn't a Pérez nearby."
He walked back toward Basquiat's "Pez Dispenser." "OK, it's a well-known fact I love dinosaurs," Griffin continued wryly, "but this has a joyfulness and a playfulness to it, it's just fun! Now imagine a 13-year-old boy who loves dinosaurs. It's going to change his worldview of art when he stands in front of that painting."
