Art That's Seriously Cute
Takashi Murakami, Artist
Tongari-kun, leader of the unearthly band of insurgents who crowded into Rockefeller Center plaza last fall, voiced no demands during their one-month sit-in. As the centerpiece of an art installation entitled Reversed Double Helix --which included two 33-foot balloons, four comical sculptures of dozing guards, and a mushroom garden that also served as seating for befuddled tourists--Mr. Pointy, as he's known in English, sat mute on his toadstool perch. But his 23-foot-tall, candy-colored presence was enough to announce the arrival of Japanese artist Takashi Murakami.
The cartoonlike imagery masks serious business. Murakami's art examines the Japanese phenomenon of kawaii, or "cuteness"--think of characters such as the Pokemon or Hello Kitty, whose licensed images are sold on everything from clothing to electronic gadgets. (Hello Kitty all by herself appears on more than 20,000 products with sales of around $500 million a year.) Murakami's art explores the possible meaning of kawaii--a response, perhaps, to Japan's defeat in World War II and to the nuclear bombings that ended it. "It is sad to see the condition of the people and the country that were neutered and have been domesticated," says Murakami via an interpreter from his studio in a Tokyo suburb.
Small change. Murakami, 41, appropriates kawaii with his own Mr. DOB, whose round face and big ears show up everywhere from paintings that sell for six figures to figurines sold at supermarket counters for pocket change. "He's thoughtfully integrating his art into the public in a broad scope," says Cheryl Brutvan, a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which staged a Murakami exhibition in 2001. "And he's also challenging how we think of art as a commodity."
Murakami says his mass-production approach to art--a striking difference from the traditional "one-of-a-kind" philosophy of fine art--is intended to maximize the rest of the world's exposure to Japanese culture. Multiply the examples, and more of the world can see Japanese art--his in particular. "Rather than like human beings that bear a single baby at a time, a minority [like the Japanese] is required to choose a better chance of survival, like species that bear a large amount of offspring on the chance of some of them surviving," he says.
Murakami's work is currently part of the Supernova exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and he will contribute to a billboard project at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis next summer. He signs his name to about 100 paintings a year, plus sculptures and other lucrative projects, such as the uber-hot redesign he and designer Marc Jacobs did for the Louis Vuitton handbag line this year.
To produce this volume, Murakami has two workshops staffed with assistants, one near Tokyo and the other in Brooklyn, N.Y. He sketches his artworks on a computer, then gets his assistants to meticulously paint the life-size versions. He often E-mails his outlines to the Brooklyn studio, sometimes seeing the final product only after it is finished. It's an information-age approach that produces art from another world.
KEEP AN EYE ON: SOFIA COPPOLA Could the young director, who has followed in her dad Francis's big footsteps, be the first woman to win an Oscar for best director? Could be, given the acclaim for her second film, Lost in Translation.
This story appears in the December 29, 2003 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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