The artwork cites Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Édouard Manet's Olympia, two canonical works of western art.

[3] In 2013, Crown Hotel (Mona Lisa Black Background) sold for $7.4 million at Sotheby's sale of Contemporary Art in Paris and set a record price in France for a Basquiat artwork.

[5] Author Jana Evans Braziel describes Crown Hotel (Mona Lisa Black Background) as "a cacophonic visual screen onto which he casts his (and American culture's) anxieties about art, race, class, and commoditization.

Basquiat contrasts a black background with a centered frontal figure of a nude white woman surrounded by colorful texts and cartoon heads.

Author Leonard Emmerling noted that "if a black woman is a rarity in European painting, it is all the more indicative of an underlying racism when one does appear, as Manet's work, merely as the servant of a naked, white-skinned beauty.