The following painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, owned by the Irish rock band U2, was sold recently at Sotheby's for more than £5 Million. It was bought by U2 in New York in 1989 and hung in their Dublin studios.
A spokesman for Sotheby's said the artwork sold for £5,081,250 to a European private buyer. The current auction record for a Basquiat work stands at $14.6m (£7.4m).
But who was Jean-Michel Basquiat?
Those of you who admire the work of 'Banksy' may aleady know because, like him, Basquiat first gained popularity as a graffiti artist.
In 1977, when he was 17, Basquiat and his friend Al Diaz started spray-painting graffiti art on slum buildings in lower Manhattan, adding the infamous signature "SAMO".
In the 1980 he became a successful Neo-expressionist artist. His paintings continue to influence modern day artists and command high prices.
Unfortunately, his life was short and he died at the age of 28 of a suspected drug overdose.
This is from the webste www.basquiat.com
In his short life (1960-1988), Jean-Michel Basquiat came to personify the art scene of the 80s, with its merging of youth culture, money, hype, excess, and self-destruction. And then there was the work, which the public image tended to overshadow: paintings and drawings that conjured up marginal urban black culture and black history, as well as the artist's own conflicted sense of identity.
He was, all at once it seemed, the ultimate party animal, a wannabe streetkid and grafittist hiding his black Brooklyn middle class roots, an advocate and interpreter of the marginal and dispossessed at the court of the mainstream, an angry black aspirant to the all-white art canon, a precocious talent, a creature of cynical marketing and a fraud, a proto-muIticulturalist, an American original.
jackfrost
Pro 
i prefer banksy as he is simple to underrstand and makes a point