There was a gap in expertise in editing the book and my essay that was not evident until the work began in the office, in July 2018. Here is an example of the notes that I received in writing my book. The Director of Publications, Diana Murphy, wrote with an expectation to be taken seriously that writing about Emory Douglas, the artist who created the Black Panther iconography that Basquiat was familiar with and referenced in the police figures for Defacement, is “going too far afield” and not “justified.” Artworks and artists ranging from antiquity to the late Middle Ages, to the 18th-century (I was referencing Francisco Goya) to Basquiat’s present were evident in his influence. I could see this, as I had been studying his work at the point of these edits for 15 years. In this draft, I was making a connection between Goya and Douglas, underscoring the range of material from which Basquiat drew, as well as his sophistication in understanding political art throughout the modern era, 1500 to the present. Murphy and her Publications team did not understand this, and had no clue what I was talking about when I explained this. The Guggenheim thought my work was the problem. They frequently failed to exhibit any sophistication in understanding the layers of meaning in Basquiat’s work.

They were editing my work from a place of cultural, intellectual, and field deficit that was in part because they had no cultural literacy of Blackness, political art, or the influences of the Neo-Expressionist artists active in 1980s New York. Rather than admit that, they attempted to blame me for their ignorance. Murphy, Young, Spector and others projected their embarrassment and anger of a narrative in their head — that I didn’t know what I was doing — and created private and public narratives that my scholarship and writing were not up to par, which can the public can read Spector repeating in the incomplete transcripts online. The Atlantic published this as fact, despite the overwhelming evidence showing otherwise.