A personal essay about Basquiat, Second Life, and the strange places art can still reach us.
The first time I saw Basquiat's "Bird on Money," I was in Second Life.
Not in a museum. Not in Miami. Not standing in front of the canvas in one of those rooms where the lighting is so expensive it makes you feel educated just for being quiet.
I was 26 years old, awake at 2 a.m., sitting badly in front of a computer, in pajamas (boxers), clicking my way through a fake world where I could afford things.
Not buy things, afford them. With Lindens.
Second Life, in 2007, was ridiculous in the way only early virtual worlds could be ridiculous. Everyone looked like an early attempt at personhood: shoulders, hair, pants, and ambition all loading at different speeds. Bodies moved with the grace of office furniture. Hair floated. Physics seemed optional, but loneliness worked fine.
I was not there looking for culture.
I was looking for something to hang in my fake house.
That was the joke of it. I was broke in real life, or close enough to broke that every bill was laid face down underneath my TV remote on the coffee table. But inside Second Life I could afford a house. Or a version of a house. Two stories, bad lighting, a view I had not earned, and enough empty digital space to make me feel responsible for decorating it.
So I wandered into a store.
I don’t know if you have ever been in a Second Life art store before. Of course you haven’t. But the store was made to look like a gallery, with white walls and clean spacing and the little hush that people try to build around expensive things, even when the walls are pixels and nobody inside the room has knees that work correctly.
Someone had built a gallery inside that world, pixel by pixel, and somehow gotten rights to display digital versions of actual artworks. Or maybe they hadn’t. The legal framework of Second Life was about as clear as its graphics.
I was clicking around, because that’s how you walk in virtual worlds. You click around. You drift. You overshoot the door. You turn too sharply. You stand too close to things.
Backstory.
Up until this moment, I never fully understood people who stood in front of paintings and came away speaking like something had been done to them. I understood liking a thing. I understood wanting to seem like the kind of person who understood it. But the spellbound part made me suspicious. It felt like one more performance people learned for rooms where everything was expensive and nobody wanted to look uninformed.
I did not distrust art.
I distrusted the performance of being moved by it.
And then, it was there.
Basquiat. 1981. “Bird on Money.”
The image should not have been able to reach me the way it did.
It had crossed too many unserious borders to count. The gallery was rendered. I moved the body with a mouse. The house waiting somewhere was a house only because the program said so. The neighborhood had no weather, no taxes, no consequence. Physics were optional (you could fly if you wanted to).
Nothing about the situation had earned the right to move me.
Still, I stopped.
Not my avatar.
Me.
My hand stayed on the mouse. My shoulders went up around my ears, the posture of a man caught caring too much about something no one had asked him to care about. One hand on my mouse. The other useless in my lap.
At 26, I did not trust being moved.
Being moved meant admitting something had found you. That you had not managed yourself all the way. That your small private arrangement of irony and low expectations had failed to keep you safe.
I stared longer than I meant to.
I know, to some people, Bird on Money is a mess. Lines going nowhere. Scribbles. Random words. A cartoon bird. The kind of thing an uncle walks past in a museum and says my kid could do that.
I get it.
It is loud. It is crowded.
It looks careless from a distance, but up close, it felt argued over.
The painting did not organize itself for the comfort of someone standing safely outside it, and that night I was about as safely outside it as a person can be.
I did not know enough to understand what I was looking at. I knew the name Basquiat. I knew the outline most people know: young, Black, brilliant, used, collected, gone.
But my body had already decided something before my mind could catch up.
So I did what people do now when the body has already decided something and the mind is embarrassed to be late.
I opened another tab.
Basquiat. Bird. 1981.
The facts came up in the same light as the painting.
Charlie Parker was “Bird.” Dead at 34.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, painting him in 1981, would be dead at 27.
I sat there, one hand still on the warm plastic mouse, and felt the fake room begin to fail.
Not disappear. Fail.
Two Black geniuses. Two bodies that could not survive the speed of what came through them. Two men the world would learn how to price after it had finished asking them to burn.
That was enough.
The room around me did not actually change. That was the problem. The cup was still on the desk. The bills were still where I had left them. The cheap furniture still wore its gray film. The apartment kept being the apartment. Nothing had moved except whatever part of me had been trying not to be reached.
Parker was a genius whose body could not survive what had been done to it, and what he had done to it, and what the world had made available as escape. He died in a hotel suite at 34, his body so worn down by heroin and alcohol that the coroner reportedly thought he was somewhere between 50 and 60.
I read that sitting in a chair that was already telling me about my own lower back. My eyes were dry the way they get at 2 a.m., that grit you blink against and cannot clear.
That detail stayed with me.
Not because it was dramatic.
Because a man can make something that changes music and still have a body that gives out in a room somewhere. A man can alter the future and still be misread by the person examining what is left of him.
Basquiat knew this story intimately. In 1985, he told The New York Times Magazine:
“Since I was seventeen I thought I might be a star. I’d think about all my heroes, Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix… I had a romantic feeling about how these people became famous.”
I was one year younger than Basquiat would be when he died.
Eight years younger than Parker.
Nineteen years younger than I am now.
That kind of math does not mean much when you are young. You see death on the map. You know it exists. But you do not believe it is moving towards you.
Back then, and even sometimes still, I thought value was something you eventually proved. You worked hard enough, stayed up late enough, made something strong enough, and one day the world would turn its head and say your name correctly.
I had not learned yet how often the world waits until a person is exhausted, or addicted, or dead, or safely turned into a story before it decides they were worth anything. Basquiat seemed to know. Parker had known before him. I was looking at both of them through a screen, late to everything, somehow on time.
I kept studying.
The painting was full of arrows, symbols, names, phrases. Some in Spanish. Some in whatever language Basquiat made for himself.
There was PARKER. There was OMNI. And there, near a sketch of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, were the words PARA MORIR.
In order to die.
Basquiat would be buried in that same cemetery in 1988, 27 years old, in ground he had already sketched and labeled. The painting was not decoration. It was a direction. He was telling you where the pain was and where he was going, and the second part came true.
So no, your kid probably couldn’t do that.
I want to be exact about where I was when I understood that.
I was inside a world built so that no one in it could die.
My avatar could not age. It could not overdose in a hotel suite. It could fall off a building and stand back up. No one would ever misread its body, because it did not have one. Not a real one.
It could stand forever in the same room without its knees hurting, without its eyes drying out, without its bloodstream carrying anything dangerous or inherited. It could teleport, change clothes, buy property, walk through walls, stand too close to others, and suffer no consequence beyond looking ridiculous. And even that was not really suffering.
It was the version of me I wanted to project when rent and fatigue and body and history were not involved. It had clothes without laundry. A house without debt. Taste without cost. Space without paperwork. A life clean of all the ordinary negotiations that make wanting feel embarrassing.
And into that place came PARA MORIR.
The phrase did not belong there. That was the whole of it.
My avatar could own the image, but it could not receive it.
It could hang “Bird on Money” on a wall that had never held weight, in a house that had never received a bill, and remain untouched.
But it was addressed to me.
Not the version of me standing upright in the digital room, dressed how I would be at my best.
Me.
The one sitting badly in pajamas (boxers) at 2 a.m. in an apartment whose furniture knew exactly what I could afford.
The absurdity did not ruin the encounter.
It made it worse.
A young Black man alone in a rendered room, trying to make a house look lived in, staring at a painting about men whose work had outlived the bodies the world had worn down. The painting did not make the room holy. It did not rescue anything. It did not turn the apartment into a gallery or my poverty into depth.
The room on the screen had done the one thing I had not asked of it: it had returned me to the room I was actually in.
The cup on the desk. The light on the backs of my hands. The small mess I had stopped seeing because it was mine. None of it could be fixed with Lindens.
So I bought it.
Of course I did.
In that world, buying was the easiest thing there was.
A few thousand units of a currency that was not money, for a copy of a painting about what money does to people. I do not remember the cost. I could look up the Linden conversion to real dollars. I am not curious.
The bird went into my inventory. Somewhere in Second Life, my avatar had acquired a masterpiece.
I must have gone home and hung it up.
I don’t remember the room exactly. Maybe there was a couch. Maybe a bad digital lamp. Maybe some attempt at a view. The kind of room a broke man makes when nobody can charge him for wanting.
But I remember the feeling after.
I remember the knowledge that the image had crossed over.
Not cleanly. Not fully. Not as the actual canvas, not as the thing itself with its surface and scale and material presence. But enough of it came through to trouble me.
That still bothers me.
The image should not have been able to reach me the way it did.
Everything about the encounter should have weakened it. The bad graphics. The digital currency. The avatar with no bloodstream. The little glowing copy on a screen in an apartment no one would confuse for a museum.
But maybe that was why it reached me.
Because nothing in that world was supposed to have weight.
So I closed it.
There is a specific click for that, the one that ends the program, and I made it on purpose. The fan in the computer kept going for a second and then settled. The little ambient sound of that world (you stop hearing it until it stops) was gone, and the apartment was as quiet as it actually was.
Somewhere in the program my avatar was still standing in front of the wall, where it would go on standing after I was asleep and after I was awake and, for all the program cared, after I was dead.
It would never be buried.
The bird would be safe on its wall forever.
The monitor went black.
I let go of the mouse.
My hand felt the absence of it.
A black monitor is a mirror. I had been looking through it all night, at a gallery, at a version of me, at a painting a dying man made for a dead man, with a cemetery already waiting inside it.
Then the light behind it died and the glass turned the picture around. It did not give me the avatar back. It did not give me the painting, safe in its inventory.
It gave me a face. 26 years old, 2 a.m., pajamas(boxers), ghosted onto the exact rectangle where a painting about a cemetery had been glowing a second before.
The only thing in the apartment that could age.
The only one the world would eventually get around to pricing.
The only one, in the whole night, to whom PARA MORIR had ever actually been addressed.
Basquiat painted Bird on Money in 1981.
I was born in 1981.
I did not know what to do with that then. I still don’t, exactly. It is not evidence of anything. The date did not feel historical then. It kind of feels strangely adjacent now, like the painting and I had entered the world in the same year and taken very different routes to that cheap monitor at 2 a.m.
Thanks for reading.
- Edgar
Bird on Money is part of the Rubell Family Collection in Miami. It was acquired in 1981, the same year Basquiat painted it. That puts the acquisition at the very beginning of his rise, before his work became the kind of thing most people encounter through museums, auction headlines, or album covers. Rubell Museum lists the work as acrylic and oil on canvas, 66 by 90 inches. I could not find a reliable public sale price. If you’re hoping to see it in person, check with the Rubell Museum first, since museum displays can change.
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