Just in from Hyperallergic: "PYT Burger, a fancy new joint on Bowery in Manhattan known for its 'stunt burgers,' is hoping Basquiat’s name will help sell a $64 burger. It’s enough to make a starving artist cry." You know what makes ME want to cry? The fact that this burger is being sold using iconography from Basquiat's own work:

#pytnyc

A photo posted by PYT Burger (@pytburger) on Sep 16, 2015 at 7:38pm PDT

That crown—and crowns in general—practically served as punctuation in Basquiat's work, making frequent appearances in his early paintings. Basquiat started out as a street artist, and that crown has always read to me as a signature. It's been appropriated often since Basquiat's death—perhaps most awkwardly in the 2013 logo of the band Fall Out Boy.

There's no getting around the inextricable connection between art and commerce. I went to art school; I know how it works. But there is certainly something perverse (in a bad way) about using the work of an artist—especially an artist who is dead, especially a detail from his work that was considered a trademark—to sell jocularly priced hamburgers.

It brings to mind Patti Smith's recent disavowal of New York, and the increasingly inhospitable environment it offers to young artists (you know, like Basquiat once was). "I can't speak for new generations because they probably have their way of negotiating all of this, but I can just say it doesn't welcome people that have very little, that just want to get a little job and have a little practice place to play with their band," she said in a recent interview. "I mean, all of my band left New York because they couldn't afford to live there. We lost our practice place. I lost my art studio because all of our spaces were taken by entrepreneurs with a lot of money. But it's still a wonderful city, a great city, it's just, I guess, if you're scrappy you have to find a new way to get around in it."

But hey, a hamburger named after an artist only sets you back $64.