For Al Diaz, the history of SAMO has never been as simple as the story that followed it. Created with Jean-Michel Basquiat in the late 1970s, SAMO has since been folded into the mythology surrounding Basquiat, often described as an alias, a conventional graffiti tag or shorthand for Same Old Shit. Diaz sees it differently. What the two teenagers developed was closer to an invented product: a series of cryptic, satirical messages written for anyone walking the streets of downtown New York, not ju...
For Al Diaz, the history of SAMO has never been as simple as the story that followed it. Created with Jean-Michel Basquiat in the late 1970s, SAMO has since been folded into the mythology surrounding Basquiat, often described as an alias, a conventional graffiti tag or shorthand for Same Old Shit. Diaz sees it differently. What the two teenagers developed was closer to an invented product: a series of cryptic, satirical messages written for anyone walking the streets of downtown New York, not ju...
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