The OpenAI Coder Who Spun Tech On its Head
Fixer. Feather ruffler. Coder in chief. OpenAI President Greg Brockman wears a lot of hats at the buzzy startup. But his toughest job may be keeping its bigger rivals at bay after jolting them awake with the breakout success of ChatGPT.
THE TAKEAWAY
• OpenAI’s president has equity in for-profit unit, unlike CEO Altman
• Brockman played a key role in developing GPT-4
• Ex-Stripe CTO has a reputation for rapid execution, pushing for small improvements
Greg Brockman needed a win.
In 2017, Brockman—then chief technology officer of OpenAI, a 50-person nonprofit at the time—was worried about getting left in the dust by bigger rivals like DeepMind, an AI lab owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet. He also was concerned that OpenAI might fall into the trap that had ensnared other artificial intelligence labs, where researchers fiddled around with projects that were never put into practice.
So Brockman spearheaded a plan to get OpenAI’s researchers and engineers working harmoniously together to create software that could play Dota 2, a complex online battle game. Although both groups had similar duties—researchers focused on training new models, while engineers built software to make those models work—there had been tensions between the two on other projects at OpenAI, a common dynamic inside tech companies, former OpenAI employees said. After months of all-nighters, their software eventually aced the game, and by early 2019 it beat the world’s best human Dota 2 players in thousands of games, generating buzz among gamers and AI researchers.
The success of that effort became the template for creating OpenAI’s biggest sensation yet: ChatGPT, which has captured the tech industry zeitgeist over the past several months. While the chatbot wasn’t based on any radical breakthroughs in AI research, its magic came from a single-minded focus on translating ivory-tower white papers into systems that can perform real-world tasks. And Brockman, more than any other figure at OpenAI, has helped sharpen that focus by pushing technical staff of all stripes to work together on key initiatives, people who know him say.
“If you look at a lot of AI labs in history, people sat around and thought about ideas and [made] really great research breakthroughs, but it’s a difficult thing to take that and actually make it into a product,” said Adam D’Angelo, CEO of question-and-answer site Quora, who sits on OpenAI’s board of directors along with Brockman.
“Greg is the person who’s going to make it actually happen,” D’Angelo said.
While Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, is the company’s public face, Brockman is its secret weapon. He is OpenAI’s president, but his daily responsibilities bear little resemblance to those of most tech leaders with that title. Brockman, 34, has no direct reports, freeing him of the usual drudgeries of management. Instead, he spends about 80% of his time coding, he told The Information in an interview.
“Greg has got a great ability to see both the extreme details of every part of the technical problem, down to the metal at every level, and then also think very strategically about how all the pieces need to come together,” Altman said.
Brockman is an itinerant figure, wandering between different teams to set goals and push them for incremental improvements in software efficiency. He then hops to new projects, leaving them in the hands of managers. “I’m churning up dirt constantly,” Brockman said.
There are downsides to his approach. After he codes a key part of a project on his own, it can take months for other OpenAI engineers to figure out exactly how Brockman solved technical problems, said two people who have worked with him. In early 2022, Brockman insisted on rewriting from scratch a major piece of software the company used to train its models, forcing the rest of OpenAI’s employees to adapt to the new system, one of the people said. Inserting himself into projects and overruling other managers by dictating a change in the team’s priorities could rub colleagues the wrong way, concedes Brockman, who said he has worked on his interpersonal skills to learn to ruffle fewer feathers.
“The failure mode of the way I work could be that people feel thrashed,” he said.
Still, Brockman’s impact explains why others revere him. People who have worked with him describe Brockman as the quintessential “10X engineer”—Silicon Valley slang for a programmer who is 10 times as productive as the average worker. That work has translated into real business for OpenAI, which is now on pace to generate hundreds of millions of dollars per year from selling access to its software, as The Information has reported. Aravind Srinivas, who worked at Google and OpenAI before founding an AI-powered search engine, Perplexity, last year, describes his former colleague’s impact bluntly.
“The hardest-working person at OpenAI is Greg Brockman,” Srinivas said.
Brockman’s combination of coding, product decision-making and team wrangling is a rarity in tech, Srinivas added. “There’s no such person at Google,” he said. (A Google spokesperson declined to comment.)
Brockman’s fear of several years ago—that OpenAI might not be able to compete with bigger rivals like DeepMind—didn’t come to pass. Instead, the surge in interest and sign-ups for ChatGPT caught Google and DeepMind off guard, leaving the much bigger company playing catch-up with development of its own AI chatbot, Bard. And OpenAI, which launched a for-profit arm in 2019, has a powerful ally in one of Google’s biggest rivals. Microsoft, which has struggled to turn its own AI research into revenue-producing products, has poured billions of dollars into the startup to gain access to its technology, valuing the seven-year-old firm at more than $20 billion.
But things can change quickly in tech. Lumbering tech giants have reinvented themselves before and could do so once again, to OpenAI’s detriment. Brockman and his colleagues at the startup could also fail to deliver on their ultimate vision of developing artificial general intelligence—AGI— which refers to systems that display human-level intelligence. Such a system would be far more advanced than ChatGPT, with the ability to do everything from groundbreaking research to starting companies.
More ominously, some AI researchers are frightened that AGIs could eventually break free from their human masters and wreak havoc. But Brockman is more optimistic about humans’ ability to build AI that won’t be a threat. “We would be naive to think that the way we think about problems today is going to be the same way we think about them five years from now,” he said.
College Dropout
Brockman grew up in Thompson, N.D., a town of about 1,100 people near the Minnesota border, where he distinguished himself in science and mathematics. As a student at Red River High School, he earned a silver medal for his performance at the 2006 International Chemistry Olympiad. After maxing out the math curriculum at his high school by 10th grade, he began taking most of his classes at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks.
“My principal required me to take three classes a semester at the high school, and then I could take anything I wanted at the university,” Brockman said.
Brockman enrolled in 2008 at Harvard University, where he planned to major in math and computer science (he had learned to code while spending a gap year abroad in Russia and China). But when he felt he couldn’t learn anything more about software from his peers at the school, he dropped out of Harvard. He transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where students “knew way more about software than I did,” Brockman said.
He didn’t stay long there, either. After setting his sights on launching his own software company, Brockman met entrepreneurs Patrick and John Collison, who were working on a fledgling payment startup, which they later named Stripe. He decided to talk to them about a job, even though he had his doubts about their business.
“I was pretty sure it wasn’t possible to succeed, and that it would be necessary for us all to wait until we were older to have any real impact,” Brockman said. “But I was curious to find out which of us was wrong, so I took the meeting.”
Brockman was the one who was wrong. Dropping out of MIT on a Thursday in 2010, he was on a plane to join the Collisons’ company in San Francisco by the next Monday. Brockman spent five years at their company, later named Stripe, eventually becoming its CTO during a period in which it saw explosive growth and became one of the most highly valued startups in the tech industry.
Becoming a Fixer
The genesis for OpenAI was a dinner in late 2015 at the Rosewood Hotel, a popular gathering place for tech investors and entrepreneurs in Menlo Park, Calif. Brockman attended, along with a dozen or so other tech luminaries, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk and then-Google research scientists Ilya Sutskever and Dario Amodei. Altman, who had met Brockman through Patrick Collison, had brought the group together to discuss assembling some of the world’s top AI researchers to create a new nonprofit lab to develop AGI, Brockman said.
At the time, Altman pitched the project as a critical counterweight to the AI brainpower technology giants like Alphabet were hoarding. Putting advanced AI in the hands of powerful corporate interests could lead to a technology that benefited only a select few instead of humanity at large, Altman believed.
Brockman, who had left Stripe recently, was all in on the project from the start. “As we were leaving, Sam and I looked at each other and said, ‘Let’s do it. Let’s actually start this lab,’” Brockman said.
OpenAI’s earliest backers—including Brockman, Altman, Musk, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Y Combinator founding partner Jessica Livingston and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel—collectively pledged $1 billion to fund the new nonprofit. Brockman, who became OpenAI’s CTO, took the lead on recruiting researchers to staff the new organization, inviting a group of candidates to join him in Napa Valley over a weekend to pitch them on the project, said one former OpenAI employee.
In OpenAI’s early days, his responsibilities were fluid—and sometimes mundane. Brockman spent his first day on the job scrounging around for a whiteboard to write on during a brainstorming session with fellow OpenAI co-founders Sutskever and John Schulman, a computer scientist who joined from University of California, Berkeley.
“That was what I thought my job would be—that I would be just the fixer, the guy who will say, ‘Whatever it is that you need to be better at what you’re doing, I will go do that,’” Brockman said. “It took a couple of weeks for me to find the first engineering problem, and I became a fixer for that.”
In OpenAI’s first years, Brockman and Sutskever made most of the day-to-day decisions, with Brockman managing the startup’s software engineers and Sutskever overseeing its researchers, two people who were there at the time said. Meanwhile, Brockman was on the phone constantly with Altman, who was running Y Combinator at the time, Brockman said. Altman and Musk were co-chairs of the company’s board.
One puzzle Brockman had to solve was getting its researchers and engineers playing from the same score. Some OpenAI engineers minimized the significance of researchers’ contributions, while its researchers saw engineers as technicians rather than scientists, a reflection of the experience many of them had working in larger corporate labs, former employees said.
But the Dota 2 project spearheaded by Brockman helped break the ice. To push the effort along, Brockman spent hours on the phone with Dota 2’s developers to figure out how to make the software for playing the game work, a technical challenge given that the game and OpenAI’s algorithms were written in different programming languages, three people involved said.
OpenAI’s engineers also struggled to apply their machine-learning algorithms to a game with a seemingly limitless number of variables, from how players moved to features on the game’s map. They eventually figured out how to do it through careful engineering and expensive computing power.
Those advances would also help Brockman as he became a key figure in the development of OpenAI’s generative pre-trained transformer models, former employees said. Work on those models, which generate humanlike answers in response to text-based prompts, also began in 2017, after Google researchers published a research paper titled “Attention Is All You Need.” The paper showed how a deep-learning model called a transformer could help people build larger models more efficiently.
While GPT didn’t rely on any research breakthroughs at OpenAI, it helped the startup build a product that would not break down with millions of people using it, one person said. Bent on optimizing the speed and cost of OpenAI’s systems, Brockman would “obsess about every few gains that can be had,” said Perplexity’s Srinivas, who worked on GPT at OpenAI.
“It’s an engineering innovation in the sense that they got to an unprecedented scale,” said Yoshua Bengio, a professor of computer science at Université de Montréal, who has published some of the foremost research on a branch of machine learning that enabled transformers and GPT.
AI Arms Race
In late 2017, Musk held a meeting at OpenAI’s office to share a concern: The startup was moving too slowly and was at risk of losing to DeepMind, whose technology he feared was on the brink of accelerating beyond reach, according to one person who attended the meeting.
Musk suggested that Tesla, because it was a for-profit company, would be better positioned to develop AGI because of its ability to raise more capital. Some OpenAI employees responded that by doing so, Musk would be feeding an AI arms race in which companies prioritized speed over safety as each sought to reach AGI first. Musk left OpenAI’s board in 2018.
Musk didn’t respond to a request for comment. Altman declined to comment on the meeting.
Despite those disagreements, Altman and Brockman took the Tesla founder’s comments to heart, especially as costs of training AI software were rising. OpenAI was spending roughly $34 million per year on Google Cloud services in 2018, a figure that doubled in 2019, The Information previously reported. At one point, the team working on the Dota 2 project alone was spending over $2 million a month on computing power—more than 90% of the company’s monthly computing budget at the time, said a person with direct knowledge of the effort.
But to develop AGI, OpenAI would need much more capital—billions of dollars. Brockman recalled encountering heavy skepticism from investors reluctant to put millions into a research nonprofit with no hope of financial upside for them. “We just realized it wasn’t possible and that we would need to pivot entities,” he said.
The result: OpenAI in March 2019 created a for-profit subsidiary with the potential for a payday for outside backers, though returns would be capped at 100 times their initial investment.
Altman took no equity in the for-profit arm, as The Information first reported. For his part, Brockman said he did take equity (he didn’t respond to an email asking how much). Brockman’s stake may limit his influence over OpenAI in one respect: He is a board director at OpenAI, and the company’s bylaws specify that only board members without financial stakes can vote in situations where the interests of the nonprofit’s and the for-profit subsidiary’s investors may diverge.
Inside OpenAI, some employees were uneasy about the creation of the for-profit arm. Some felt OpenAI was abandoning its ideals to develop AI systems that would be free of corporate influence. In the end, most went along with the change because they felt the company’s leaders were attempting to strike a balance that would allow OpenAI to still responsibly pursue its goal of creating AGI.
As OpenAI has continued to refine GPT, some of its employees have become disenchanted with Brockman’s approach to releasing new products. ChatGPT, for example, has been blasted by some critics for spewing misinformation and bizarre behavior.
In late 2020, a group of employees led by OpenAI’s vice president of research, Dario Amodei, left to launch a rival called Anthropic. According to Brockman, the dispute with Amodei and other Anthropic co-founders hinged on ideological differences about how long to wait before releasing AI software. Brockman preferred to ship products and use customer feedback to improve them.
“This picture [that] you can solve these problems in a vacuum…it’s a fallacy,” Brockman said.
Amodei didn’t respond to a request for comment.
When ChatGPT launched in November, its success caught Brockman off guard. “For us, we look at all the flaws—it doesn’t work for this, doesn’t quite work for that, doesn’t work for this—but then you kind of miss the fact that because it’s so useful for everything, that actually lots of people are going to find surprising utility in it,” he said.
The response touched off a scramble across the tech industry to come up with similar chatbots. Alphabet's two rival AI labs, DeepMind and Google Brain, began cooperating for the first time in order to try to catch up to OpenAI. In March, Anthropic released Claude, a ChatGPT competitor. In the meantime, Musk earlier this year recruited DeepMind researcher Igor Babuschkin to launch a new “anti-woke” AI lab within another company Musk owns, Twitter.
Meanwhile, Brockman continues to push OpenAI’s products forward. In March, he conducted a demonstration of GPT-4, the company’s latest AI model, showing how it could generate code for a website based only on a rough sketch of the site’s design. The demonstration exceeded the capabilities of any model publicly released by another tech company.
“I don’t think the whole project would have shipped near this level of quality without his involvement,” Altman said.
Opec puts the power of the Russian price cap to the test
Also in today’s newsletter, the US’s new role as an energy exporting superpower
How Opec’s oil supply cut could help Russia
The Opec+ surprise oil supply cuts have thrown up a host of new problems for western leaders. First, it raises the likelihood of another summertime surge in prices at the fuel pump. That in turn would make central banks’ fight against inflation, and fending off a recession, all the more difficult.
The supply cuts could also complicate another top priority in Washington and European capitals: starving Russian president Vladimir Putin’s war machine of cash as the invasion of Ukraine continues.
The west has deployed a price cap to try to restrict the flow of petrodollars going to Moscow, while ensuring its barrels continue to make their way on to a global market that still needs them.
As a reminder, at $60 a barrel, the price cap aims to put a ceiling on the price of Russian seaborne oil sales that use western shipping and financial services. That price point makes it just attractive enough for Putin to keep oil flowing, while limiting upside from rallying crude prices, policymakers have argued.
Western policymakers have argued it has been a success up to now. “What is indisputable is that through our actions, we have dented Russian oil revenues and that there have been no shocks to global energy markets,” Ben Harris, a leading architect of the policy at the US Treasury, said in a recent speech.
But as Karim Fawaz, an analyst at S&P Global, points out, the success of the policy has been helped by a loose crude market, with lower prices and excess supply. With market prices for Russian crude trading below the price cap, it hasn’t really been put to the test.
But if the Opec+ cuts successfully tighten supply and start to force prices higher, it would improve “the market landscape for Russian barrels”, Fawaz wrote in a recent note. That would force policymakers “to make a tough decision,” he added.
If the market price for Russian crude surges above $60 a barrel, will western policymakers maintain strict enforcement of the price cap? That would risk taking even more barrels off the market, magnifying the Opec+ cuts and potentially adding fuel to an oil price surge. Or do they ease sanctions enforcement in the name of protecting consumers from pain at the pump and allow Putin to stockpile oil revenues? That could strengthen Russia and expose tensions that have so far been kept at bay within the western alliance.
Those tough decisions could some sooner rather than later. Reuters reported yesterday that rising Brent prices after the Opec+ announcement and strong demand from Russian and China have already pushed the price of Urals, a crucial Russian international benchmark, above the $60 a barrel price cap level.
“We are trying to thread the needle here, maintaining current levels of [Russian] production, obviously at the lowest prices possible,” a senior US official recently told me.
That’s about to get trickier to pull off. (Justin Jacobs)
US energy exports scale new heights
Whatever the status of Russian exports, American oil and gas producers are continuing to capitalise on the disruption.
US crude shipments over the four weeks to the end of March were 4.95mn barrels a day — a new record — according to data released yesterday by the Energy Information Administration.
That is 18 per cent higher than the previous four weeks and almost 50 per cent higher than the same time last year.
Adding gasoline, diesel, propane and other fuels, exports were a whopping 11.24mn b/d over the same period — also a record.
But it is not just oil. Liquefied natural gas exports are also rocketing towards new heights as the Freeport LNG terminal cranks back into gear, after an explosion last year put it out of action.
LNG exports jumped 12 per cent in March, according to preliminary data from consultancy Kpler, to 7.25mn tonnes. That is more or less on a par with last year’s peak and sets April up to be a record-setting month.
The soaring exports in oil and gas underline the US’s newfound role as an energy exporting superpower and critical fuel supplier to global markets.
For now, with gas prices depressed and oil prices well off their highs, that is not ruffling feathers in Washington.
But it is less than a year since the Biden administration spooked exporters by threatening potential export controls in a bid to reduce the pressure at the pump for US motorists.
If oil prices continue their ascent, exports are certain to return to the political limelight. (Myles McCormick)
Data Drill
US coal prices have plunged from their record highs of last year, putting the focus back on the industry’s long-term decline.
Central Appalachia coal prices averaged $85 a short tonne yesterday, down nearly 60 per cent from their record highs in September, according to Platts of S&P Global Commodity Insights. Prices for Illinois Basin coal prices are also down 60 per cent from their summer peak, according to the US Energy Information Administration.
The rapid deflation comes amid falling gas prices, milder winter temperatures curbing fuel demand, and increased competition with renewables. US coal prices surged last year as Europe’s scramble to move away from Russian gas and a scorching summer added pressure to domestic supply.
“Now that winter is over and European ports are well-stocked with coal, global prices have dropped significantly. This has in turn put downward pressure on US domestic spot coal prices,” said Morgan Snook, associate pricing editor of coal at S&P Global Commodity Insights. The analytics firm expects 21GW of coal plants to retire in the US this year alone.
With falling demand and more plant retirements, analysts don’t expect a similar resurgence in coal prices.
A report released this week by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis found that the US is transitioning away from coal faster than expected. The IEEFA expects the US to close half of its coal generation capacity by 2026, the earliest date since it began tracking closures.
Earlier this week, President Joe Biden announced $450mn in funding for clean energy projects located in former or current coal mines as part of the administration’s effort to include coal country in the energy transition. The Treasury also released guidance on how these projects can receive a bonus tax credit in the Inflation Reduction Act.
Xi Jinping warns against escalating Ukraine crisis as he meets Macron
Chinese leader holds back from publicly committing to more active role in influencing Moscow
Chinese president Xi Jinping on Thursday warned against any escalation of the crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and repeated a call for peace talks, but did not publicly commit to playing a more active role in influencing Moscow.
He spoke after a first round of meetings in Beijing with French president Emmanuel Macron, who had earlier urged him to “bring Russia to its senses” and “back to the negotiating table” at the beginning of a three-day state visit.
“We call for restarting peace talks as soon as possible . . . taking into account the legitimate security needs of different parties . . . while building a balanced, effective and sustainable European security architecture,” said Xi, who did not mention Russia by name.
“China and France hereby urge the international community to remain restrained and rational and avoid any steps that might escalate the crisis or even let it get out of control,” he added.
Along with other European leaders, Macron has been seeking to convince Xi to use his close relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin to help lay the groundwork for a negotiated end to the conflict, although Élysée Palace officials acknowledge privately that the effort may not succeed in the short term.
The palace also unveiled a series of deals for French businesses in China, underscoring economic links between the nations after Macron travelled there with about 50 business leaders.
Macron and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, who is also on the trip, had previously warned China there would be consequences if it were to provide weapons to Russia in Ukraine.
The US and Europe are increasingly concerned about Beijing’s deepening economic and political ties with Moscow since the invasion of Ukraine. China has provided an economic lifeline to help blunt the impact of sanctions by becoming the biggest buyer of Russian oil and gas and providing technology such as chips.
Xi travelled to Moscow last month in a clear demonstration of his personal ties with Putin, whom he called his “dear friend”.
While the US under President Joe Biden has taken a harder line against China and urged Europe privately to do the same, the EU and countries such as France and Germany have sought a middle path of “de-risking” their relationships with China while continuing trade and diplomacy.
Macron was accompanied by a delegation of about 50 business leaders including from state-backed nuclear group EDF, train maker Alstom and waste and water specialist Veolia.
Airbus on Thursday signed a contract to open a new assembly line in Tianjin, doubling its capacity in China, and won approval from Beijing to proceed with orders for 160 planes, mostly A320neo models.
The Élysée said Alstom had signed a deal to build a metro in Chengdu, while French container shipping giant CMA CGM agreed to work on biofuels with a Chinese group and the Shanghai port.
Xi said Beijing and Paris were “staunch promoters of the multipolarisation of the world”, a reference to reducing US dominance. “We are sure that Europe will develop its relationship with China in total independence,” he added.
The Élysée said Xi and Macron’s meeting was “frank and constructive” and lasted about 90 minutes. They will meet again tonight with von der Leyen ahead of a state dinner, and again in Guangzhou on Friday for a more personal dinner with their wives.
Shi Yinhong, an international relations expert at Renmin University, downplayed the idea that Macron and von der Leyen could truly affect Chinese policy on Russia. “China’s relatively pro-Russian position and policies . . . have been so firm and frequently expressed,” he said.
Paul Haenle, a former China adviser to US presidents George W Bush and Barack Obama, said that Macron’s decision to travel with a large business delegation and pursuing economic deals undermined his efforts to pressure Xi on Ukraine.
“Because it is clear that they want to benefit from China’s economy . . . then of course that gives President Xi more leverage on other issues and less willingness to have to compromise,” said Haenle, now with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think-tank.
The visit, Haenle added, had meanwhile presented Xi with an opportunity to push France and Europe on their strategic autonomy and not “fall blindly into the American camp”.
“President Xi is trying to drive a wedge between the US and the EU. Because in the Chinese view, Europe is still at play,” he said.
Basquiat x Warhol at Fondation Louis Vuitton — sparks fly in dazzling collaborations
The association between the artist rebel and Pop art master produced witty, complex pictures that explored capitalism and racism
On October 4 1982, art dealer Bruno Bischofberger invited 21-year-old Jean-Michel Basquiat to meet his hero, Andy Warhol, over lunch. Warhol took a Polaroid shot, Basquiat seized the photograph, ran back to his studio and two hours later had a painting, still wet, delivered to the table: the double portrait “Dos Cabezas” (Two Heads).
On one side, a glacial, thin-lipped Warhol, his skin and wig painted in de Kooning’s soft pinks and greys, looks out with his gleaming voyeur’s eye. On the other, against a bright blue ground, beams Basquiat with a cartoon grin and dreadlocks in thick luscious strokes, recalling Franz Kline’s blacks. It’s a raw, direct image, gritty as an urban mural, yet showing sophisticated knowledge of art history.
“Oh I’m so jealous! He’s faster than me,” Warhol exclaimed. He had previously encountered Basquiat the teenage graffitist, “the kid who used the name ‘Samo’ when he used to sit on the sidewalk in Greenwich Village and paint T-shirts, and I’d give him $10 here and there”. Now, the canvas declared, Basquiat the handsome, hot neo-expressionist painter was challenger to Warhol, Pop art’s king of cool.
At the entrance to the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s lavish exhibition Basquiat x Warhol: Painting Four Hands in Paris, “Dos Cabezas” hangs back-to-back with “Arm and Hammer II”, which the two artists made together. Warhol painted the logo of the baking soda company in two circles; in one, Basquiat replaced the flexed white baker’s arms with a black saxophonist based on Charlie Parker. Blue spheres of musical notes float up from his saxophone on to Warhol’s gold ground, reminiscent of his golden “Marilyn”s. Joyful and witty, Basquiat’s message claiming space for black creativity is clear.
Basquiat x Warhol is the most comprehensive account yet shown of a rollercoaster friendship, begun in the highest spirits. In his 1983 drawing “Foto (Jean-Michel Basquiat being photographed by Andy Warhol)”, the younger artist depicts himself at the top of a staircase, a wiry leaping stick-figure with orange head and bulging eyes, while Warhol, a ghoul in a tapering cape, is on a lower step, angling his camera. His “Jean-Michel Basquiat Six Polaroids”, the same year, fragmented nude depictions, were subsequently collaged into the contrapposto silkscreen “Portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat as David”. Basquiat countered with the comedy “Brown Spots (Portrait of Andy Warhol as a Banana)”, the long face appearing as the fruit is peeled back — the white man in the jungle.
When Bischofberger suggested that they work together, it felt like a natural progression for both. Warhol was fired up by Basquiat’s rebellious energy — and, having not touched a brush for years, by his commitment to paint. Basquiat, although already selling well, was intoxicated by Warhol’s fame, and his restless hybrid style — fusing comics, hieroglyphs, references to music, films, paintings — lent itself to collaborative effort.
For their large-scale joint canvases, Warhol put down the background, usually a handmade graphic image of a famous logo: say, the looped letters GE within an ornamental circle, emblem of General Electric, powerhouse of America. Basquiat then adorned, effaced, defaced, added colour and layered his own contributions, sometimes simply — the black skull at the centre of “GE/Skull”; the graceful figure of a black server bearing gin and tonic in “General Electric with Waiter”, plus one of his little graffiti cars struggling uphill across the logo — and sometimes with complex references. Repeatedly, his concern with race trumped Warhol’s motifs of commodity capitalism.
“General Electric” is bisected by a ladder to nowhere, topped by a rocket lying on its side and two heads reprising the double portrait: a velvety deep black one and a flurry of abstract marks suggesting the wigged, weary Warhol. From the brilliant yellow “Sweet Pungent”, scrawled with wobbly diagrams of machinery and the words “flies” and “fleas”, leaps a black figure with mask face and fists raised in the Black Power salute. This decorative piece was once owned by fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger.
The Paramount series, similar dazzles of competing imagery, contrasting hues and all-over marks playing across film company Paramount’s star-encircled logo, is led here by “China Paramount”, dominated by six exquisitely painted mask-heads denoting black and Asian stereotypes. Its first owner was Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes, who said: “It seemed to tell the story of what was going on in the middle of the 1980s. ’Cause it had the chaos and the cultural clashes . . . it was sharp and modern . . . they were a pair of mavericks that had found each other and made these incredible pieces.”
But if musicians and fashion designers understood creative collaboration, 1980s art critics did not. Shown in 1985, the joint works were panned, The New York Times calling Basquiat Warhol’s “mascot”. Basquiat dropped Warhol like a hot coal. Three years later both were dead.
Individually, their status since has never been in doubt. But the collaborations remain problematic: do they represent the best or the worst of each artist, a happy or a desperate union of age and youth, or just a dealer’s cynical ploy?
Across Fondation Louis Vuitton’s broad range, one senses, variously, all those things. Some works are undoubtedly banal, but the entire group reads like an extended conversation, veering between chatter, jokes (the Denture series riffing on the American smile is studded with Basquiat’s toothy devils; snakes and rats loop through the Dollar Sign pictures), evolving thoughts, flashes of insight and outbursts of monologue.
Particularly moving is the quiet comment “Collaboration (Chairs/African)”: Warhol outlined two white wicker chairs, which stand empty; beneath them, Basquiat’s black figure squats on the ground. But hanging opposite, the glorious 10-metre “African Masks”, a frieze of heads referencing tribal art, Picasso and television cartoons celebrates the black figure triumphant, culminating in a map of Africa as a black face spewing fire.
The show’s great finale is the nocturne “Taxi, 45th/Broadway”, formerly owned by fashion designer Gianni Versace. The luminous taxi, outlined by a projector with classic Warholian detachment and economy, speeds across the canvas, the structural anchor for a Basquiat anecdote: the white driver, spurting graffiti expletives, declines a black passenger, leaving him on the dark pavement, dissolving into beautiful black/purple streaks stamped with the word “Negro”. Basquiat, wealthy and successful in art circles, was customarily refused by taxi drivers and at restaurants; here is his revenge in paint, making the invisible black figure visible.
This is a fascinating show: for its exploration of how collaboration works, or doesn’t; for the convergence of Pop art’s flat neutrality with Basquiat’s gestural and emotive extravaganzas; and above all for its sociopolitical resonance today. Within this potent evocation of divisive 1980s America, it is absolutely compelling to watch the drama of a young black artist effectively over-painting the work of a white cultural icon.
Research Calls
- Upgrades:
- Ambarella (AMBA) upgraded to Outperform from In-line at Imperial Capital; tgt $95
- Canadian Nat'l Rail (CNI) upgraded to Outperform from Sector Perform at RBC Capital Mkts
- Columbia Banking (COLB) upgraded to Outperform from Mkt Perform at Keefe Bruyette; tgt lowered to $29
- Columbia Banking (COLB) upgraded to Strong Buy from Outperform at Raymond James; tgt lowered to $28
- Comerica (CMA) upgraded to Strong Buy from Outperform at Raymond James; tgt lowered to $57
- FedEx (FDX) upgraded to Outperform from Mkt Perform at Raymond James; tgt $285
- Ferrari (RACE) upgraded to Neutral from Sell at Goldman; tgt raised to $283
- Fifth Third (FITB) upgraded to Outperform from Mkt Perform at Keefe Bruyette; tgt lowered to $34
- Fluence (FLNC) upgraded to Outperform from Peer Perform at Wolfe Research; tgt $25
- Hercules Capital (HTGC) upgraded to Overweight from Neutral at Piper Sandler; tgt $16
- Huntington Banc (HBAN) upgraded to Mkt Perform from Underperform at Keefe Bruyette; tgt lowered to $13
- Leslie's (LESL) upgraded to Buy from Hold at Loop Capital; tgt $16
- Popular (BPOP) upgraded to Outperform from Mkt Perform at Keefe Bruyette; tgt $74
- Pool (POOL) upgraded to Buy from Hold at Loop Capital; tgt raised to $415
- Pure Storage (PSTG) upgraded to Outperform from Neutral at Wedbush; tgt $34
- Wells Fargo (WFC) upgraded to Strong Buy from Outperform at Raymond James; tgt lowered to $47
- Welltower (WELL) upgraded to Buy from Neutral at Citigroup; tgt raised to $81
- Downgrades:
- Atlantic Union Bankshares (AUB) downgraded to Mkt Perform from Outperform at Keefe Bruyette; tgt lowered to $36
- Applied Materials (AMAT) downgraded to Neutral from Outperform at Exane BNP Paribas; tgt $133
- Comerica (CMA) downgraded to Neutral from Overweight at JP Morgan; tgt lowered to $44
- Healthpeak (PEAK) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Citigroup; tgt $23
- KLA Corporation (KLAC) downgraded to Neutral from Outperform at Exane BNP Paribas; tgt $435
- Lumentum (LITE) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Rosenblatt; tgt lowered to $48
- MercadoLibre (MELI) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at New Street; tgt $1350
- Mosaic (MOS) downgraded to Neutral from Overweight at JP Morgan; tgt lowered to $46
- PNC (PNC) downgraded to Underperform from Mkt Perform at Keefe Bruyette; tgt lowered to $125
- Renasant (RNST) downgraded to Mkt Perform from Outperform at Raymond James
- Stem (STEM) downgraded to Peer Perform from Outperform at Wolfe Research
- Super Micro Computer (SMCI) downgraded to Underperform from Neutral at Wedbush; tgt $65
- Triumph Financial (TFIN) downgraded to Mkt Perform from Outperform at Raymond James
- Trustmark (TRMK) downgraded to Mkt Perform from Outperform at Raymond James
- Others:
- Am Natl Bankshares (AMNB) resumed with a Mkt Perform at Raymond James
- Bioceres (BIOX) initiated with an Outperform at Oppenheimer; tgt $15
- Carter Bank & Trust (CARE) resumed with a Mkt Perform at Raymond James
- Ciena (CIEN) initiated with a Buy at WestPark Capital; tgt $70
- Corteva (CTVA) initiated with a Perform at Oppenheimer
- Datadog (DDOG) initiated with a Neutral at DA Davidson; tgt $70
- Iris Energy (IREN) initiated with a Buy at B. Riley Securities; tgt $4
- Janux Therapeutics (JANX) initiated with an Outperform at Wedbush; tgt $24
- Limoneira (LMNR) initiated with a Buy at B. Riley Securities; tgt $24
- Marqeta (MQ) initiated with a Buy at Deutsche Bank; tgt $7
- New Relic (NEWR) initiated with a Buy at DA Davidson; tgt $100
- Pinterest (PINS) initiated with an Outperform at Raymond James; tgt $33
- Qorvo (QRVO) initiated with a Hold at Stifel; tgt $110
- ServisFirst Bancshares (SFBS) resumed with a Mkt Perform at Raymond James
- Skyworks (SWKS) initiated with a Buy at Stifel; tgt $150
- Textron (TXT) initiated with a Peer Perform at Wolfe Research
- Toast (TOST) initiated with a Hold at Deutsche Bank; tgt $20
- XPO, Inc. (XPO) initiated with an Outperform at BMO Capital Markets; tgt $44
Gapping down
In reaction to earnings/guidance:
- LITE -14.2% (guidance; increases repurchase program), RPM -5.4%, BKE -4.8% (March comps), STZ -0.8%, ABBV -0.5% (guidance)
Other news:
- IGT -3.7% (expands to New Mexico)
- AMPL -3.1% (reducing workforce by 13%)
- COST -2.4% (reports March data)
- PBI -1.9% (Board of Directors issues letter to shareholders; Hestia nominee Lance Rosenzweig unqualified as a Director or as CEO)
Analyst comments:
- MELI -1% (downgraded to Neutral from Buy at New Street)
Gapping up
In reaction to earnings/guidance:
- FOXF +2% (guidance)
Other news:
- JILL +5.1% (announced completion of refinancing transaction)
- PL +4.9% (executive purchases $1.9 mln of stock)
- ENTA +3.9% (granted Fast Track designation for EDP-323)
- JFIN +3.2% (announces sales of equity interest in Fuzhou Zhuoqun Jieneng Information Technology and Fujian Jiaxi Financial Guarantee)
- PSNY +1.8% (reports global volumes for first quarter of 2023)
- SHEL +1.2% (provide Q1 update)
- IMGN +1% (receives non-dilutive term loan financing for up to $175 million with Pharmakon Advisors)
- NEO +1% (to share nine abstracts at the American Association of Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2023)
Analyst comments:
- LESL +6.2% (upgraded to Buy from Hold at Loop Capital)
- FITB +2.3% (upgraded to Outperform from Mkt Perform at Keefe Bruyette)
- FLNC +1.9% (upgraded to Outperform from Peer Perform at Wolfe Research)
- HTGC +1.7% (upgraded to Overweight from Neutral at Piper Sandler)