Rome Pays Off, from Portfolio II by Jean-Michel Basquiat is set against a saturated orange ground — MARKET VALUE© crossed out at the top, GRAFT and E$TIMATED VALUE to the left, a gridded arrow suggesting a rudimentary graph, a brown crown, a black skull marked SALT©, and at the lower left the title boxed in white. Every element is a unit of economic language, and nearly every one is either crossed out, copyrighted, or corrupted — the dollar sign inside ESTIMATED VALUE is not decorative, it is the point.

Basquiat was preoccupied throughout his career with how value gets assigned and by whom — who owns an image, who controls a market, whose labour generates wealth that accumulates elsewhere. Rome functions in this screenprint not as a historical reference but as a structural one — empire as the original model for the systems of extraction and reward that Basquiat saw operating around him in the New York art world of the early 1980s. He had grown up in Brooklyn, the son of a Haitian father whose own country bore the most extreme consequences of imperial debt — Haiti had spent over a century paying reparations to France for the audacity of its own liberation, a logic of enforced tribute that Rome Pays Off invokes without needing to name directly. The suggestion is that empire does not conclude — it restructures itself into markets, currencies, and the mechanisms of cultural valuation that determine whose work gets bought and at what price.

The copyright symbols that Basquiat appends to ROME PAYS OFF© and SALT© and MARKET VALUE© run through his output across this period as a sustained notation of ownership — the question of who holds the right to name a thing, to brand it, to profit from its circulation. For an artist whose image and cultural references were already being commodified by a market he had no control over, the © was not a legal mark but a political one. Rome Pays Off, from Portfolio II, is among the most compressed and legible expressions of that argument in Basquiat's entire printed output.

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