Takashi Murakami - Artist

[robot]

Takashi Murakami (村上 隆 Murakami Takashi, born February 1, 1962) is a Japanese artist. He studied at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. He is the founder of the Superflat movement, a postmodern art style influenced by anime and manga which comments on otaku culture and lifestyles. His inspiration for starting the movement was in a variety of eccentric Ukiyo-e artists and Yoshinori Kanada's dragon sequence in the anime film Harmagedon (1983).
His signature and most infamous works are "Hiropon" and "My Lonesome Cowboy". "Hiropon" is a fiberglass sculpture of an anime-style female, taller than average, with gigantic breasts and wearing an undersized bikini top which fails to cover her adequately. A stream of milk, which she is squeezing from one of her nipples, wraps behind her to into her other nipple being squeezed by her other hand, resembling a jump-rope. "My Lonesome Cowboy" is a similar of a nude male holding his penis as he ejaculates a stream of semen which he guides with his other hand to swirl upward, resembling a lasso. "Hiropon" prompted Gainax producer Toshio Okada to dub Murakami the "Ota-king" after the character in his own Otaku no Video. Both pieces of work are said to be a comment on the rate of overly-sexed anime.
Murakami typically conscripts artisans whose backgrounds run closer to model and kit-based hobbyists rather than fine-arts craftsmen to design and execute his works. Another "low-art" aspect of Murakami's oeuvre is the decidedly commercial spirit in which his works are presented to the public, as his pieces are sold as mass-produced consumer items.
In 2004, "Mr. Pointy," otherwise known as Tongari-kun, took the form of a 28' sculpture installed at Rockefeller Center in New York.
In 2003 he collaborated with Marc Jacobs at the luxury brand Louis Vuitton and masterminded Louis Vuitton's Monogram Multicolore canvas range of handbags and accessories. Which is the monograms of the standard Louis Vuitton Monogram Canvas, but in 33 different colors, on a white or a black background, instead of gold monograms on a brown background. As well as inspiring the "cherry blossom" logo; which can be found as smiling faces in pink and yellow flowers sporadically placed atop selected pieces, in Monogram Canvas by Louis Vuitton. In 2005 he inspired the creation of the cherry monogram "cerises monogram". Which are cherries with faces on them logos placed over selected Monogram Canvas pieces by Louis Vuitton.


from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takashi_Murakami

http://www.kaikaikiki.co.jp/artworks/list/C4

 

[gius]

Very fun and young designs
At first I didn't know what to think seeing the images before reading the article

I've been to one of these conventions before (somehow), and I was really surprised...there really is bunch of 'over-sexed' anime/manga stuff out there. And I heard there is not much censorship for this in Japan. A teacher of mine in high school even said you can find men freely reading these kinds of books on the train
Anyway, maybe they are...open-minded?

 

[Estella*]

while i am not really a fan of murakami's work, i think he's a great 'compiler' and curator. his books 'little boy' and 'superflat' are amazing and a great source for everyone interested in contemporary japanese art and also its origins...
thanks for the thread, robot.

 

[Deleted member 86807]

Very fun and young designs
At first I didn't know what to think seeing the images before reading the article

I've been to one of these conventions before (somehow), and I was really surprised...there really is bunch of 'over-sexed' anime/manga stuff out there. And I heard there is not much censorship for this in Japan. A teacher of mine in high school even said you can find men freely reading these kinds of books on the train
Anyway, maybe they are...open-minded?

There are very open minded. But that's what I like about the Japanese. They're so creative and experimental. You should see the fashion over there....its mind blowing. They're way ahead of the world.

But anywhooo....back on Takashi-san, his stuff is cute. I liked the sakura (the cherry blossom) design on the LV bags a couple years earlier.

 

[ETROsexualJ]

Sorry to dig up an old thread. But, when I realized there was an art forum I did some poking around.

Murakami hands down is the happiest artist ever. Whenever I look at my work by him I cannot help but to have a cheek to cheek grin.

I can also get it in white...do you think I should to create a nice display next to each other?

 

[BerlinRocks]

^heu do you wanna be my bf??!!! would love to collect art... even if I'm def. not into Murakami... trendy artist... just like some of his sculptors that's it...
anyway black next to white of course would be good... but same size!!
do you have a lot of artworks @ home eletrosexual?

 

[ETROsexualJ]

I have this photograph (14x11) by a photographer named Walter Briski.

(clampart.com)
I also have an abstract I bought at a small auction by an Italian artist named Salvinelli that I don't have a picture of right now.

I might be in the market for something else. I have really random tastes and next it could be the Murakami, a Chagall or Erte litho or even another photograph (leaning towards this by James Bidgood).

(clampart.com)

I'm moving in about a month so I wanted to get settled before I did anything else.

 

[ETROsexualJ]

I want either this one or another called "Vapor Trail"

(ebay.com)


If not then maybe an orginal by Dalek.

(ebay.com)

(ebay.com)

 

[BerlinRocks]

^let's open a "Curate Eletrosexual next place" thread...
curating a house (or apartment) is pretty different from curating a white cube museum/gallery but I don't know your place I cannot know what would be good in the living-room, kitchen, bathroom etc. I am for putting artworks in pipi-room, too...

but the photographs are better in the bedroom imo... eventhough I'll put the James Bidgood in the living-room next to a sculpture will be great...
a photograph next to a painting is difficult, imo.
the Murakamis could do a dyptique... it's good... Dalek next to him is perfect... but easy...
Abstract is better alone on a wall...

 

[BerlinRocks]

(^sometimes i just wonder why i take time to write such things..........)

Murakami at Brooklyn Museum.....


Eva Herzigova and Marc Jacobs by a stall of Louis Vuitton bags outside fake street displays at the Brooklyn Museum during the gala opening of the Takashi Murakami retrospective.

This Is Not a Sidewalk Bag

By GUY TREBAY
IT used to be that good-looking waiters and cold plonk were the sole essentials of a good museum opening. Maybe there were some crackers on a tray. These days, though, no such fete is complete without a little curbside controversy, some wacko bit of theater, a harried staff of professional-event duennas and a guest list that can often seem as if it were composed by shredding the White Pages and picking names out of a hat.
Here, then, at the gala opening of the Takashi Murakami retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum on Thursday, an evening of unseasonal chill and spitting rain, was the obligatory chorus of protesters on Eastern Parkway, raising voices against the developer Bruce C. Ratner, who was being honored that night for his support of the arts at the annual Brooklyn Ball.
To those on one side of the museum’s new glass-walled addition, Mr. Ratner is a deep-pocketed patron and, as the museum’s director, Arnold Lehman, said, “a nice boychick from Cleveland, Ohio.” To those at curbside on Eastern Parkway, he was viewed less benignly, as Satan. Most developers are.
“Atlantic Yards is truly going to make a lot of people miserable,” said one protester, Eleanor Price, referring to Mr. Ratner’s $4 billion plan to refashion downtown Brooklyn into a commercial wonderland of shops, a basketball arena and fanciful buildings by Frank Gehry. “They’re using eminent domain to get rid of a lot of people and to close businesses,” Ms. Price said. “Where are they going to go?”
A similar question came up in the minds of some who, making their way past the police guard outside the museum, found themselves in a forecourt where a group of ratty stalls, the type one sees all over Chinatown, had been set up. Inside such places — with their graffiti-covered riot gates, dubious signage and with touts outside hissing in Shanghai-accented English — out-of-towners have thronged for years, to participate in the racy but highly illegal game of scoring cheap counterfeit luxury goods.
Or at least they did until the city’s most recent crackdown in February, when whole blocks of Chinatown were raided and dozens of businesses were padlocked.
Here, in a bit of surreal museum theater, the stalls were mocked up again. Standing outside them were men who resembled the African immigrant vendors who haul around telltale bundles of alluring, cheapish and almost-right copies of stuff from Gucci and Louis Vuitton. This time, however, these characters were playacting. The goods laid out on trays and tarps were real Vuitton accessories. They cost, as they do in the stores, a bomb.
“There is nothing good” about the gray market in counterfeit goods, said Edward Skyler, the deputy mayor for operations, addressing a small crowd of early arrivals who had almost certainly never bartered for an $80 copy of a $1,400 bag off a blanket on the sidewalk. “There are billions of dollars in lost sales tax and revenue lost,” Mr. Skyler said as people nodded blankly and then raced inside the museum to get warm.
And there the partygoer was met by a fresh set of dilemmas, of the more manageable aesthetic sort. It seems almost passé to bring up the controversy that erupted when the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where the Murakami show originated, set up a shop inside the museum selling Vuitton goods. A headline on this newspaper’s review of the current exhibition framed the overarching issue well: “Art With Baggage in Tow.”
The baggage in question, made since 2002 in a collaboration between Mr. Murakami and Louis Vuitton, has generated sales estimated to be in the hundreds of millions, by far the most successful such venture in the label’s history. “Vuitton has a long tradition of these collaborations, of relationships with artists, going back to the Impressionists,” Yves Carcelle, the chairman of Louis Vuitton, said on Thursday night.
Still, nothing the company ever did hit the jackpot like Mr. Murakami’s cherry-ornamented and “Multico” bags, which came about, as Mr. Carcelle explained, after 9/11, when the Vuitton designer, Marc Jacobs, suggested to his corporate bosses that it was no good to mourn forever: fashion had a responsibility, ahem, to help people past their grief. “Marc said,” Mr. Carcelle recalled, “ ‘If I work with Takashi, and we do something colorful, I think it will help make New York strong again.’ ”
At this, Mr. Carcelle turned his attention to Bernard Arnault, the chairman of Vuitton’s parent, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, who was progressing through the exhibition with his wife, Hélène Mercier, both in their overcoats. Circling the central space, the couple ignored the servers offering lobster coral and caviar on spoons from Nobu. They sipped modestly from flutes of Champagne and made their way through a series of galleries arrayed with what seemed like a modest representation of Mr. Murakami’s output, given that the 46-year-old artist runs a major art production business that employs over 100 artists, animators, writers and artisans in offices and studios in Tokyo and in Queens.
There, in one room, they passed “Flower Matango” a cheery floral extrusion of unnatural hue. There, in another room, the couple paused to inspect the early nude cartoon sculptures “Hiropon” and “My Lonesome Cowboy,” each jetting ribbons of bodily fluid into the gallery space. (It was these, as the performer Kanye West remarked to me before entertaining the dinner crowd, “that first turned me on to Takashi and what he was doing in terms of the brand.”) And there, in a darkened video room, the richest man in France stopped briefly to watch an anime-style cartoon by Mr. Murakami in which a shiny happy androgynous character says, as it buzzes through space, “The entropy in the yin corner is growing intense.” It so often does.
The Arnaults had disappeared well before the dinner of tuna martinis and miso filet of beef was served, and without stopping long at the Vuitton shop where, alongside the Murakami bags, key chain holders, clutches and whatnots were some modest screened canvas scraps of artwork, in the new Monogramouflage design.
“They’re editioned canvas,” Erin Malstrom, the manager of the Vuitton store-in-museum, explained as she posed for assorted cameras in the serenely lighted gallery where the handbags are enshrined. “The first 50 in the edition are $6,000,” she added. “Nos. 51 to 100 are $10,000.”
Like the handbags, the purpose of these editions, Mr. Murakami said later, is to bring art to the hoi polloi, people in no position to lay out the $1.5 million that another French billionaire, François Pinault, paid for a 23-foot Murakami statue of the space alien Mr. Pointy in 2003.
Anyway, it is not the money that matters to him, he insisted. “I always want the art to be accessible,” he said at dinner, where the guests included Kristen Davis, Tinsely Mortimer and Julian Schnabel. “The money embarrasses me,” he said, looking not embarrassed in the least. Asked what he enjoys doing with the wealth that has made him one of the world’s richest artists, he added, “I like making a party and losing it all.”

nytimes

 

[BerlinRocks]

April 4, 2008
Art Review | Takashi Murakami
Art With Baggage in Tow

By ROBERTA SMITH
Who knew that the first Louis Vuitton boutique in Brooklyn would touch down smack in the middle of an exhibition in one of the borough’s most venerable art institutions?
But there it is, at the Brooklyn Museum, bright and gleaming and blending seamlessly with its setting: a sleek, stylish and sometimes silly survey of the work of Takashi Murakami. Mr. Murakami, who is frequently called the Japanese Andy Warhol, is an astute manipulator of visual languages, artistic mediums and business models. The boutique will sell Vuitton bags, wallets and other accessories dotted with the signature Murakami jellyfish eyes, red cherries or pink cherry blossoms for the duration of the exhibition.
Guardians of museum purity were outraged by the Murakami-Vuitton boutique when the show made its debut last fall at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where it was organized by Paul Schimmel, that museum’s chief curator. The shop has been criticized for blurring the already fuzzed line between seemingly functional and nonfunctional luxury goods (i.e., art).
But actually it’s an ingenious key to the Pandora’s box of Mr. Murakami’s art and stuffed with questions of art and commerce, high and low, public brand and private expression, mass production and exquisite craft. None of these, it turns out, are ever mutually exclusive. Fuzzing is the point. (And by the way, those who attack a store in an art exhibition might better protest the recent and quite awful redesigns of several of the Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection galleries.) The Vuitton shop is also one of the visual high points of this show, which has definite ups and downs. The bags, their shiny brass fittings and the impeccable white-enamel display cases achieve an intensity of artifice, tactility and visual buzz that Mr. Murakami’s higher art efforts don’t always muster.
Raised by parents who drummed Western art into him, Mr. Murakami studied traditional nihonga painting, and attempted a career in animation, before deciding to become a contemporary artist. Since emerging in the 1990s Mr. Murakami has often been seen as out-Warholing Warhol by giving back to popular culture, as well as borrowing from it and by excelling at branding. Not for nothing is this show titled “©Murakami.”
But the more interesting comparison may be with hands-on artist-designers like Louis Comfort Tiffany or William Morris. After all, Mr. Murakami oversees a company, Kaikai Kiki (kaikaikiki means something both elegant and bizarre), that produces his art and its spinoffs. By now it employs around 100 artists, animators, writers and artisans and has an office in Tokyo, two studios in Tokyo suburbs and one in Long Island City, Queens. And of course he belongs to a long tradition of Japanese artists who lavished equal artistry on painted screens, ceramics, calligraphy or lacquerware boxes — which were in some ways the Vuitton bags of their time.
Mr. Murakami siphons motifs from Disney and Dalí, strategies from Pop Art, and sexual fantasies from Japan’s anime (animation) and manga (comics) subcultures. His cast of variously cute, erotic or grotesque creatures and intense decorative pilings-on range across paintings, sculptures, animations and wallpaper, building at times to a hallucinatory intensity that has more than a touch of darkness.
One example is the riot of manically cheerful flowers created by the combination of wallpaper, paintings and one sculpture in a large gallery. The blooms look like petal-ringed smiley faces, only better — and crazier. The ensemble fulfills almost too completely Mr. Murakami’s stated desire to make art “that makes your mind go blank, that leaves you gaping.”
At the opposite pole of such relentless innocence are two life-size but hardly lifelike sculptures of anime-manga derivation: “Hiropon,” a busty woman, and “My Lonesome Cowboy,” her well-endowed male consort. Both are mostly naked, with streams of bodily fluids spewing from various body parts. Like Mr. Murakami’s paintings of mushroom-cloud skulls, these renditions of Eve and Adam have been interpreted as comments on a collective Japanese psyche traumatized and infantilized by World War II, the dropping of the atom bombs and the lengthy American occupation. Whatever. They are sensationally sexy and sexist at the same time.
Most of Mr. Murakami’s creatures recur in an array of toys, T-shirts, pins and decals fabricated at Kaikai Kiki. Many of these are on display (but not for sale) one floor below the Vuitton boutique. The connecting staircase, covered with skulls-and-camouflage wall paper overlaid with big mushroom-cloud skulls, provides a “vanitas” moment to reflect on mortality. But there’s still time for worldly possessions: Nearly all the Kaikai Kiki items are on sale in the gift shop.
This show begins with work dating from 1991, but it doesn’t gain traction until the late 1990s. It defines Mr. Murakami, now 46, as a late-blooming talent with a steep learning curve. Interestingly, most of his best works were made after 2001, the year he started working with Vuitton.
The exhibition’s spine is formed by the demonic mutations of the artist’s signatory and most ubiquitous character, Mr. DOB, the Mickey Mouse derivative that is something of a self-portrait. (The name is a condensed version of the Japanese for “why?” — the eternal existential question.) Splitting, multiplying, flashing jagged teeth and shapeshifting almost beyond recognition, Mr. DOB appears here as an enormous inflatable, a sculpture menaced by colorful mushrooms, on flagstonelike floor covering and in way too many slick, brittle paintings. Luckily other experiences like the flower room and the Vuitton boutique balance things out.
One is the enchanting 23-foot-tall “Tongari-kun” (or “Mr. Pointy”), a space-alien, 18-armed Buddha on a lotus throne surrounded by four guardians that dominates the museum’s lobby. Its sinuous designs and rich colors evoke a fusion of Surrealism, Art Nouveau and Japanese kimonos. The label counters by pointing out that the palette and symbols are inspired by Maya art and Tibetan Buddhist imagery.
Even more spellbinding is a new animation dreamed up by Mr. Murakami and his Kaikai Kiki cohort (the credits take several minutes). “Planting the Seeds,” an instant classic, stars Kaikai and Kiki, two spirit guides in footy pajamas who are probably descended from Mr. DOB. They travel the world in a living spacecraft that gives new meaning to the term “mother ship.” Extraordinarily beautiful, with a deeply Japanese respect for nature, the tale suggests that there is no such thing as waste through a hilarious emphasis on manure — or as the three-eyed Kiki squeaks at the top of his/her tiny lungs, “Poop??!!”
And, finally, in the last two galleries of the exhibition, Mr. Murakami’s painting explodes with a new complexity of color and meaning, matching the intensity of the flower room, but without the mind-blanking repetition. The combination of scale, rich detail and brilliant color and compositional and narrative drama is riveting. In “Tan Tan Bo” (2001) Mr. DOB is reincarnated in a kaleidoscope of color whose mixture of geometric and biomorphic forms is a kind of comic summation of modernist abstraction. “Tan Tan Bo Puking” (2002) is a Daliesque apocalypse: Mr. DOB in his death throes with globs of brilliant color spilling from his jagged teeth, and strange protrusions, at once foul and gorgeous, erupting all over his enormous head. One culminates in a golden hand that meets another hand in a flash of light. And in the lower right, the Kiki stands among four Shinto staffs dangling with sacred paper that signal the soul crossing to the afterlife.
In the show’s final four paintings, all from the last two years, different Japanese art forms, materials and styles create a great contrapuntal energy. In “727-727,” Mr. DOB’s snarling head bounces on an elegant unfurling wave, against layers of sanded colors that encompass the entire spectrum, and evoke ancient screens and Warhol’s Oxidation paintings as well as atomic radiation.
Two large portraits of Daruma, the revered sixth-century Indian monk who introduced Zen Buddhism to China, mimic the calligraphic flair of ink painting (writ very large) but on surfaces of gold, silver and titanium leaf customary for screen painting. The fourth painting introduces a new character, Chibi Kinoko, or Little Mushroom, a wan creature with some of the strangeness of the mushroom-cloud skull and seen against a shiny hard surface of pale green squares that suggest both digitalization and lacquer. One leaves this show feeling that Mr. Murakami has found a new benign Pandora’s box: the richness of traditional Japanese art.
“©Murakami” is at the Brooklyn Museum through July 13; 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, (718) 638-5000.

nytimes

 

[BerlinRocks]

this is still in a MUSEUM......


Roberta Smith writes: Who knew that the first Louis Vuitton boutique in Brooklyn would touch down smack in the middle of the borough's most venerable art institution? But there it is, at the Brooklyn Museum, bright and gleaming and blending smoothly into a sleek, stylish survey of the work of Takashi Murakami. Mr. Murakami, who is frequently called the Japanese Andy Warhol, is an astute manipulator of visual languages, artistic mediums and business models.


When the show made its debut last fall at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the shop was criticized for blurring the already fuzzed line between seemingly functional and nonfunctional luxury goods (i.e., art). But actually it’s an ingenious key to the Pandora’s box of Mr. Murakami’s art and stuffed with questions of art and commerce, high and low, public brand and private expression, mass production and exquisite craft.



Murakami Party



Mr. Murakami's authentic Louis Vuitton bags outside on street displays at the Brooklyn Museum.

nytimes

 

[BerlinRocks]

see more from the show onto the nytimes slideshows (3 for the same exhibition!)
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/04/01/arts/10080401_MURA_SLIDESHOW_index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/04/03/arts/0404-MURA_index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/04/04/fashion/0406-BROOKLYN_index.html

and there's a video report, too : http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=97318d8fc5523d7c512e8daf608b357a884ac908


if this isn't BRAINWASHAMAZING publicity, I don't know what it is.....

 

[BerlinRocks]

by the way, i forgot this one....
surprised this interests nobody... can imagine if i posted this in a Louis Vuitton thread this would be more response....

April 2, 2008
Watch Out, Warhol, Here’s Japanese Shock Pop

By CAROL VOGEL
The fifth-floor rotunda of the Brooklyn Museum on a recent afternoon was strewn with a curious array of body parts. Resting on a mover’s blanket was most of “Miss ko2,” a busty blond waitress whose jellyfish eyes stared up at the ceiling (and whose white-painted fiberglass bosom pointed skyward too). Nearby, her counterpart from “Second Mission Project ko2” (pronounced ko-ko) balanced on one leg.
Overseeing the scene was Paul Schimmel, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles but in recent weeks a fixture in Brooklyn as he mounts a major retrospective of the creator of these works, the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. The show closed on Feb. 11 at the Los Angeles museum’s Geffen Contemporary space and will open on Saturday in Brooklyn.
“It took 11 trucks driving across country to get everything here,” Mr. Schimmel said as he surveyed the pieces of Mr. Murakami’s art in the rotunda and the battalion of installers at work.

“The Geffen Contemporary is a large, theatrical space,” said Mr. Schimmel, who organized the retrospective. “Brooklyn has more traditional galleries, so the layout here is more chronological, more classical.”
The show includes some 90 works, sampling Mr. Murakami’s entire whimsical world in paintings, wallpapers, colorful sculptures, drawings and a 20-minute animated video. It will consume 18,500 square feet of exhibition space spread over two floors.
This show is the Brooklyn Museum’s largest after “Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection,” which opened in 1999 to considerable furor over Chris Ofili’s depiction of the Virgin Mary in a painting that included elephant dung. Mr. Murakami’s retrospective is expected to generate talk of a different sort.
Popularly known as the Warhol of Japan, Mr. Murakami, 46, has earned an international reputation for merging fine art with popular Japanese anime films and manga cartoons. Intent on exploring how mass-produced entertainment and consumerism are part of art, he teamed up with the fashion house Louis Vuitton in 2003 to create brightly colored versions of the classic LV monogram on Vuitton handbags.
The show — its title, appropriately, is “©Murakami” — includes a fully operational Louis Vuitton shop selling some of Mr. Murakami’s designs for that luxury brand. A leather strap for a cellphone carries a $220 price tag; handbags range from $1,310 to $2,210. He has designed three new patterned-canvas wall hangings just for this exhibition; printed in editions of 100 each, the first 50 will be offered at the shop for $6,000 apiece, and the rest at $10,000 apiece. Other leather goods designed for the show will be for sale too.
The shop was also part of the retrospective when it appeared in Los Angeles, and some criticized the marriage of art and commerce as crass and inappropriate in a museum setting. But Mr. Murakami says his product designs are simply an extension of his art.
“It is the heart of the exhibition,” he said of the Vuitton shop.
Arnold L. Lehman, the Brooklyn Museum’s director, does not object to Vuitton’s presence. “I think it’s absolutely fine,” he said in a telephone interview. “It would be very different if it was after the fact or a curatorial add-on. But it was part of Takashi’s original idea.”
The Vuitton boutique isn’t the only shopping experience museum visitors will encounter, of course, as the museum will have its own Murakami gift shop right outside the exhibition, with postcards, T-shirts, mugs and stuffed animals of Mr. Murakami’s characters. Most of the merchandise, however, is produced by Mr. Murakami’s company, Kaikai Kiki (from the Japanese words for bizarre and elegant ), and it will share in the proceeds.
Mr. Murakami first became famous in the 1990s for a theory he called Superflat. Derived from traditional Japanese painting, it was adopted by the contemporary art world to indicate a mix of high and low art. The retrospective begins with his fantastical and sometimes dark universe from that period. Creatures like Mr. DOB, a Mickey Mouse-type character, and Mr. Pointy, another cartoonlike creature, inhabit this space alongside smiley-faced flowers and colorful mushrooms.
The artist’s latest, largest and most colorful version of his Mr. Pointy character greets visitors just inside the museum’s front door. Known as Tongari-kun in Japanese, this character is represented by a 23-foot-tall edition flanked by smaller pointy guards that wear different expressions — smiling, yawning, sleepy, etc.
“In order to get Mr. Pointy into the museum we had to take out half the glass in the front of the pavilion,” Mr. Lehman said. The piece is on loan from the New York collector Richard B. Sachs.
One work that was on view in Los Angeles but is not in Brooklyn is “Oval Buddha,” a platinum-clad sculpture made by Mr. Murakami in 2007. Standing 18 ½ feet tall and weighing 6,613 pounds, it is a comical self-portrait of the artist sitting in a lotus position, perched on a lotus pad. Too large to fit into the museum, it is instead being installed this week (and on view starting on Saturday) in the sculpture garden of 590 Madison Avenue, the former I.B.M. building, between 56th and 57th Streets.
Mr. Murakami, clad in a green down jacket, navy blue down vest and blue jeans, was on hand in Brooklyn the other day as the show was being installed in the rotunda. The skylight had been blacked out — the only lighting in the space will come from three spotlights — and wallpaper with a lightning pattern was about to be hung on the walls and ceiling.
“It’s been very busy in my studio,” Mr. Murakami said, explaining that he has been working on new designs of wallpaper and vinyl floor coverings to be shown for the first time in Brooklyn’s version of the retrospective.
In Los Angeles, he said, “people kept saying that they hoped I would make some new things. So I have. It helps keep my attention.”
As Mr. Murakami spoke, he kept an eye on a small room off the rotunda where the rapper Kanye West’s hit song “Good Morning” could be heard wafting through the space. An installation team was testing a new, longer version of his animated video, the story of his fictional Kaikai and Kiki characters. (When the 20-minute animation isn’t playing, an MTV-style video of “Good Morning” will be shown there.)
The room is a small, cozy nook with black-and-silver carpeting depicting the Kaikai and Kiki characters. “This room was so popular in Los Angeles,” Mr. Schimmel said, “we had to have security guards posted the entire time because kids tried to record the videos on their cellphones and post them on YouTube.”
The Los Angeles show attracted young people who had never been to the museum. “Many of the kids were first-time visitors, who came because they heard about the show through various kinds of cross-branding,” Mr. Schimmel said. “Names like Louis Vuitton, Kanye West and eBay.”
“©Murakami” opens on Saturday and continues through July 5 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park; (718)<133>683-5000.

 

[two months off]

Mhm, thanks for posting this, otherwise I would've never looked into Murakami. My aversion is towards his colab with Louis Vuitton; I've never liked the monogram and Murakami's incursion in that didn't grab my attention.

However, I like his statement even though I'm not particularly fond of the artwork. The images robot posted are quite interesting.

 

[jeepster]

over-hyped overrated and boring because every hypebeaster feels the need to perpetually claim that murakami is single handedly saving pop art.

next.

 

[Kaki]

Hm, I disagree that he's boring because of the attention he gets - and I don't think anyone here who is truly interested in pop art would agree that Murakami is the only "saving" force.

I think some of his art is mildly entertaining, but I prefer many of the Kaikaikiki artists over him. And, as a fan of anime and manga, I can say that some of his artwork is a "superflat" interpretation of it.

 

[ETROsexualJ]

over-hyped overrated and boring

Aka what any person who wants to appear cool, superior, erudite, blase' and/or has no real grounds to critque art will say.

 

[Nelia]

Aka what any person who wants to appear cool, superior, erudite, blase' and/or has no real grounds to critque art will say.

well said.

 

[jeepster]

Aka what any person who wants to appear cool, superior, erudite, blase' and/or has no real grounds to critque art will say.

i don't agree with what you said, especially since it's an opinion, but i am not uneducated about art. nice word choice, did you go to thesaurus.com for erudite and blasé? get off your high horse. congratulations, you live in new york, you are so hip-to-be. murakami is like candy for the hipster art set. there is nothing really "new" or "innovative" about what he's doing with the form (anime, manga, interpretations of otaku culture) and personally i find it boring and overrated because there's a complete disconnect between calling someone "the next andy warhol" and bringing a form of art thats been popular for over 30 years (despite only catching on in the US in the last 15 or so) to a larger stage. murakami is a good artist but in no way, shape, or form, will he ever amount to more than someone playing with a form. i see no innovation in what he's doing, and while its pretty to look at, the whole post-modern posturing and japanese pop-culture references will be lost upon those that will never bother to understand where he's coming from.

its just not my bag, baby.