A Panel of Experts, from the Superhero Portfolio by Jean-Michel Basquiat, is structured like a Saturday morning television schedule and reads like an indictment of one. Against a black ground, two collaged white panels carry cartoon figures, comic-book sound effects, and a crown — while the surrounding image spells out the terms of the transaction: VENUS MADONNA©, SATURDAY MORNING CARTOON©, MILK-SUGAR (DEXTROSE), SUGAR©, SUGAR COATED CORN PUFFS©TM. Everything is copyrighted. Everything is sweetened. The panel of experts named in the title are the people who decided what a generation of children would watch on weekend mornings, and what they would absorb alongside it.

Saturday morning cartoons were a specific institution in American culture from the 1960s through the 1980s — a programming block that sold toys and sugar to children using characters whose adventures modelled a world in which good and evil were clearly distinguishable and justice was reliably delivered. Basquiat grew up watching them, and understood, as many Black children did, that the heroes of those cartoons almost never looked like him. The copyright symbols appended to VENUS MADONNA and SATURDAY MORNING CARTOON place mythology and entertainment in the same category as breakfast cereal — all of them products, all of them owned, all of them delivering a version of the world that served the interests of whoever held the trademark.

KRAK, the comic-book impact noise at the centre of the image, is both a punch landing and a syllable — the sound of something hitting something else. In a work about who controls the images children grow up inside, it is the most honest notation in the image. Jean-Michel Basquiat made the original work in 1983, twenty years into the Saturday morning cartoon era, and his Estate issued this screenprint in 2022 in an edition of 85.

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