Before he was Jean-Michel Basquiat, the wild child prince of the 1980s art world, Basquiat was working with fellow street artist Al Diaz under the pseudonym SAMO, short for “Same Old Shit,” up until 1979. The duo spray painted barbed, deeply meaningful aphorisms across Lower Manhattan (the entirety of which have been photographed by Henry Flynt), such as “SAMO as an end to mindwash religion, nowhere politics and bogus philosophy,” “SAMO as an escape clause” and countless others. Basquiat himself was practicing both symbolic and literal escapism, he himself left home before graduating high school. Like many artists, stringing a few chosen letters together in order to craft an anonymous…