C R IT IC ’S CORNER
FIGURE 3
Takashi Murakami
© Murakami
, 2007,
mixed media
installation.
FIGURE 4
Takashi Murakami
L V Hands, ©
2002,
Takashi Murakami/
Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.,
all rights reserved.
4. Magdalene Perez,
“T H E AI IN T E R V IE W :
Takashi Murakami,”
Art
+
Auction,
June 9,2006,
reprinted in
A R T IN FO ,
artinfo.com/news/
story/17056/takashi-
murakami.
5. Among Murakami’s
oeuvre arc limited-edi-
tion fiberglass sculptures
(in May 2008, his
Lonesome Cowboy
, a
sculpture of a naked man
whirling his ejaculate
like a cowboy’s lasso,
brought in $15.2 million
at auction), $5,000 limit-
ed-edition Louis Vuit-
ton handbags and plastic
figurines packaged with
bubblegum for $3.
consume them. “Good taste,” for the connoisseur of craft or of fine art,
is associated less with the object itself than with the context in which it
is presented. The rub in Koons’s work is that he devotes the considerable
skills of his craftspeople to objects that scream of kitsch. By doing so, he
raises the hoary issue of class, suggesting that the only real difference
between the working and middle classes who buy mass-produced kitsch
and the cognoscenti of the art world who buy his work is the amount of
money they are prepared to spend to outfit and decorate their homes.
For Murakami, the issue is framed somewhat differently. As a Japanese
artist, he is heir to a culture that has always been disinclined to accept the
Western distinction between fine art and craft. It is also a culture, he ar-
gues, that blurs the line between art and commerce. In an interview with
Magdalene Perez, he noted, “Both by the culture and by the postwar eco-
nomic situation, Japanese people accept that art and commerce will be
blended; and in fact, they are surprised by the rigid and pretentious West-
ern hierarchy o f‘high art’”
[fig u r es 3 AND
4
]. 4
As a result, Murakami skates easily between the two worlds. Like
Koons, he has others create his work, centering his production in a studio
based loosely on Warhol’s famous Factory that employs dozens of artists
and assistants. Unlike Koons, whose works remain largely destined for
wealthy collectors and major museums, Murakami happily targets both
the cognoscenti and the Wal-Mart shopper. He creates paintings, sculp-
tures, videos, T-shirts, key chains, mouse pads, plush dolls and cell
phone caddies.5
His sources are drawn emphatically from Japanese pop culture, his
objects based on the hypersexualized cartoon characters of manga and
anime, and on the Japanese tradition of
kawaii,
or cuteness, most perfect-
ly incarnated by Hello Kitty. Unlike Koons, who employs master crafts-
men more accustomed to the creation of exquisitely wrought religious or
decorative objects, Murakami mimics Japanese craft production at the
lower end, in particular the so-called “garage kit figures”—polyurethane
anime figures created by hobbyists in limited editions.
Murakami’s activities as a writer and curator supplement his art pro-
duction and reveal a perceptive social critic behind the marketeer despised
by critics like Perl. He has argued that Japanese society’s willing embrace
of a shallow consumer culture is a defensive response to the contradictions
of Japanese history. From this perspective, Murakami’s dance between
high and low, and art and craft, can be seen as a response to what he per-
ceives as a flattening of culture in an emotionally restricted society. The
obsessive consumption of images and objects that celebrate childlike na-
ïveté, adolescent fantasy and confused sexuality becomes a way to stay
on the surface and avoid delving into the painful complexities of the Japa-
nese past and present. As with Koons, Murakami ’s melding of high and
low serves a deeper purpose, exposing the ambiguous relation of art and
craft to illuminate larger pathologies in the surrounding environment.
Franco Mondini-Ruiz throws the issue of ethnicity into the stew, and
uses the mechanisms of craft production and distribution to expose the
hierarchies that divide art from craft, high from low and hand manufacture
from mass production. Like Koons and Murakami, he recreates tchotch-
kes. However, as an artist from a mixed Native American, Chicano
and Italian heritage, he also evokes a more specific model—namely, the
082 american craft
feb/m ario
www.journal-plaza.net & www.freedowns.net
Photos courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
/
©Murakami
photo Brian Forrest.
