Jean Michel Basquiat

Perhaps Hollywood felt that a film like "Basquiat," the Julian Schnabel-directed film about the life, exploitation and addiction of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died of a heroin overdose in 1988, would be a bit too much of a downer to be the focus of a big West Coast shindig. But for the art world, Wednesday night's screening and benefit reception at the Pacific Design Center was something to crow about despite the downbeat nature of the story.

SERIES Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution: The chef and nutritionist tries to bring his message to Los Angeles, but the school district locks him out in the season premiere (8 p.m. ABC). Frontline: This week the investigative series takes an in-depth look at high school football (9 p.m. KOCE). Deadliest Catch: New skippers join the crab fleet for the 2010 season in the season premiere (9 p.m. Discovery). Braxton Family Values: R&B superstar Toni Braxton is featured in this new unscripted series (9 p.m. WE)

"The whole point," Julian Schnabel was quoted recently about his debut film delineating the brief life of fellow New York art star Jean-Michel Basquiat, "was not to have a tourist make this movie." Yet for all the difference Schnabel's expertise has made to "Basquiat," he needn't have bothered.

The Google Doodle of the day is dedicated to street artist and activist Keith Haring in honor of what would have been his 54th birthday. The search engine's logo has morphed into Haring's signature bold lines, vivid colors and active figures swallowing, wiggling and flying to make Google's lettering. The Pennsylvania-born artist learned to draw at an early age, inspired by his cartoonist father and images of Dr. Seuss and Walt Disney. As a teenager, Haring moved to New York and enrolled in the School of Visual Arts, where he ran with musicians, and performance and graffiti artists -- including Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat -- of the burgeoning alternative art community that existed outside galleries on the city's streets, subways and clubs.

An exhibition of new work by New York artist Jean Michel Basquiat looks as though it was pieced together out of debris scavenged at an abandoned elementary school. Weathered doors, the rusted remains of an erector set, banged-up little desks and hunks of pegboard are combined in whimsical assemblages that chronicle the aimless ramblings of a restless young mind. The particular mind at work appears to be that of an unusually hip sixth-grader who's obsessed with jazz and extraterrestrial life.

IAN SCHRAGER'S reborn Gramercy Park Hotel, which is to open Tuesday in Manhattan, breaks the restless impresario's own mold. "This is the opposite of what I'm known for," said Schrager, who has collaborated in the past with Frenchman Philippe Starck on sleek, chic interiors at the Mondrian Hotel on the Sunset Strip and the Delano in Miami.

A two-week series of big-ticket art auctions got off to an erratic start Monday night with a sale of contemporary works at Christie's. Records were set for 10 artists, including $6 million for "Kiss II" by Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, but 26 of the 77 pieces failed to sell. The Park Avenue auction house had predicted that sales would total between $49 million and $71 million, but when the final gavel fell--on an unsold work by the late Jean Michel Basquiat--the total was only $40.2 million.

Summer starts on a high note at the J. Paul Getty Museum, where "Rembrandt's Late Religious Portraits" (June 7-Aug. 28) brings together 16 half-length images painted in the late 1650s and 1660s, a traumatic time when the temperamental artist declared bankruptcy and endured the death of his second wife. In "Jacob van Ruisdael: Master of Landscape," Rembrandt's slightly younger contemporary turns up at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (June 26-Sept.

Fresh from a performance at the Dubai Country Club, Kanye West fit right in at Sunday's gala opening of the Takashi Murakami retrospective at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. The sharp-dressed rapper-artiste, who enlisted the Japanese art star to create videos and album art for his latest release, "Graduation," would have been perfectly comfortable mingling with the designers and socialites packed into the exhibition's Louis Vuitton store.