Is the New "York Times complicit in the sanitizing of the Life of Jean -Michel Basquiat for the market

I wrote the following letter to the Arts Editor of the New York Times after reading a memory piece and video montage about Jean-Mitchel Basquiat

Dear Editor;

I tried to find a link to the two writers, MEKADO MURPHY and LAURA van STRAATEN, of the recent Jean-Mitchel Basquiat article 

"The Jean-Michel Basquiat You Haven’t Seen" 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/13/arts/design/jean-michel-basquiat-artwork.html 

 While I have no desire to rain on the monetized memories of Alexis Adler, I must say she has sanitized the person who she lived with 1979-1980. I would suggest your writers should not be a part of this sanitized process. I remember J-MB well from that time. He was best known to us downtown as @samo; both his graffiti signature and his self- created identity. 

I had many encounters with him as I had opened two clubs that 

were popular with his/our scene:  the re-invented Hurrah, and the first Danceteria. J-MB  was a scenester,  Because J-MB came from a middle-class black family, he had the social skills to gain entrance and be socially engaged in a way different from the B-Boys that Raza Blue brought into her hip-hop events at my clubs and other nights around town.  

His personal life which Ms, Adler shares should reflect the whole person.... romanticizing someone who because of his drug addition allowed himself to be exploited by a well know gallery owner and not including his rage directed at his girlfriends,  as well as his homophobia,  is simple wrong.  Would you do that to another art genius? Like Bacon? Who this gifted artist was and how his contradictions contributed to his tragic end is important to his story. I expect more of the NY Times coverage. J-MB was gifted and a complicated artist. 

Reducing him to a sanitized individual robs the reader of how beauty can and is made. I suggest Ms. Adler think a little deeper when she shares her memories, As one od the people who knew of and observed his abuse of the women in love with him I find it profoundly troubling to position this story around Valentine's day

jim fouratt