King Brand by Jean-Michel Basquiat organises its image like a diagram that has been taken apart and put back together wrong — a crowned head at the centre connected by red lines to an anatomical ear, a brain marked NORMAL BRAIN©, a circulatory heart, a severed foot standing in grass, all of it labelled and cross-referenced with the precision of a medical textbook and the logic of something else entirely. KING BRAND sits above the crown. PETROL to the right. LOANS in large letters at the lower right. BABYLONIANS listed six times down the left margin, each entry numbered in Roman numerals, the sequence ending with BABYLONIANS crossed out.

The Babylonians were the first civilisation to develop a systematic credit economy — loans, interest, debt recorded on clay tablets, the infrastructure of financial obligation that every subsequent economic order has built on. To place that lineage alongside NORMAL BRAIN© and PETROL and a crowned anatomical head is to make the same argument Basquiat was making across Portfolio I and the Daros Suite: that the body, its classification, and its economic valuation are all part of the same continuous history, the medical and the financial operating by identical logic.

EAR DIAGRAM© at the top — the organ of hearing, copyrighted. AMORITE, CAUCASIAN, CAUCASIAN crossed out. FEET© LANDSCAPE (SEE OTHER SIDE). The copyright symbols appended to the anatomical terms are doing what they always do in Basquiat's work — marking the point at which knowledge becomes property, the body becomes a category, and the diagram stops being neutral. Jean-Michel Basquiat made the original work in 1982, when he was reading ancient history and economic theory with the same appetite he brought to everything else, and King Brand is the work in which those two subjects are most directly fused.

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