SAMO started as a joke. Two teenagers, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Al Diaz, came up with it to poke fun at the parts of society they had no patience for. Within months it had spread across SoHo and grown into a reckoning with what the art world stood for. The name was short for “same old shit.” They wrote it on walls like a brand name, with a © attached, and offered it as the cure for whatever they thought was fake. Some tags went after religion that told people what to think. Others went after politics that led nowhere, or the college-to-office routine their classmates were headed for. The ones people remembered were about art. They called the downtown avant-garde “so-called” and said its young artists were playing a game paid for by their fathers. These went up on the walls outside SoHo’s galleries, where dealers and collectors passed them every day. A few years later, those same galleries were hanging Basquiat’s paintings. #jeanmichelbasquiat #basquiat