Takashi Murakami is on a mission. His goal: blur the boundaries between high and low art; attack otaku culture, exposing it for the perversion it is; reestablish a sustainable post-war Japanese art market. His comments on the Japanese obsession over mass-produced anime, manga and lolicon imagery challenge the status quo. In our time, cheap products, new technology and dying ethics (not morals) are making the world more impersonal, real and fake every day. It would seem a great task to discover a Japanese art market, attack an overwhelmingly popular culture and confront the well-held tenets of visual arts. How did he address these difficult issues? He started Kaikai Kiki Co., LLC.
There is nothing wrong with factory-produced key-chains, plush toys, oversized sculptures or lousylumpy paintings. In fact, this is a reliable response to a consumerist, art-depraved Japanese public. It addresses the demands of this group without stretching their sense of art far. How could a firm better address an anime and manga-obsessed market? The business has an effective structure with a front-man, Murakami—CEO, president of operations and managing creative director—several lesser-known artists, Aya Takano, Chiho Aoshima, Chinatsu Ban, Mahomi Kunikata, Rei SatÅ, Akane Koide, and a willing force of nearly one hundred workers. Art sees more of this corporate-style governance than the community may be willing to recognize. These companies churn out much of the effective high-art and middle-art in our day. Profit-maximizing practices for the art community create more exposure, less work, and more product. Is not producing more what this is about? How can an artist reach a broad base without gathering an obsessed following? That is how manga and anime became popular.
These factories are exactly factories. Murakami is the head of the operation. Does that mean he designs “his” artwork? Maybe. Does that mean he has a part in any stage of production past initial blueprints? Emphatically no. He does not touch his artwork, mold it, paint it, or install it. In such a setting, how is the artwork “his” if he does not create it himself? That is the beauty of a factory. He is able to appeal to the consumerist public he faces while maintaining face. His “bending the rules,” down-with-consumerism persona construes something timeless, a worthy cause. In the same moment, his multi-national factories churns out vinyl figurines, posters and t-shirts, artworks, paintings and sculptures in an underground effort to push the same agenda. He utilizes the consumerist agenda to undermine it. Is it really possible to live by the sword and destroy it before it comes back around to kill you?
An art factory is impersonal. It is less personal than a Chinese factory producing toys for wall-marrt stores. This is because we see Kaikai Kiki Co., LLC and we think Takashi Murakami. Do we tie the late Sam Walton in with any of his stores? No. We know the products are produced by day-laborers in
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Seeing as how this is a fairly informal blog, I am just going to list the pros and cons (that I see) and other observations of Takashi Murakami's artist approach.
*as far as "giving credit where it's due," Takashi Murakami is on some vague ground. He has a company, but the company isn't mentioned underneath a piece of Takashi Murakmi and KaiKai Kiki LLC's--of course, if the company made it and he is a member of the company, I find his name redundant. Of course, this is challenging those boundaries of the identity of the artist and therefore its mythos--the image of the artist as some sort of divinely inspired messenger of truth.
*the art fair he holds I think is a good social gesture to the public to try to get today's public in touch with "contemporary art." Yet, I am not sure people register these objects as fitting into the category of art, especially if they are sold along side Superman dolls. These two gestures would seemingly be in conflict.
*his adoption of consumerist culture mirrors Rauschenberg's adoption of Abstract Expressionism/NY School. TM adopts it seemingly to satarize (more or less), like Rauschenberg satarized the New York school for its... superfluous amount of Abstract Expressionists (not that he was necessarily adverse to the work of, say,deKooning, but rather the number of New York school artist was just incredibly large). Regardless of this similar artistic gesture, I fail to see the reflection Rauschenberg had. He subverted the familiar brush stroke in contexts which made it grossly inapproriate, whereas Takashi Murakami uses consumerism... to be consumerist? Ultimately, to me, he is using common, well established ways of making money to make money. There isn't much subversion as far as I can see. Fairly inso facto.
"dying ethics (not morals)"--it would have been nice to see the author immediately explain the difference between these two. I take it that by ethics the author means a code with which art is made and shown. I would agree with that. I don't know how I feel about arguing for morals one way or the other, but I also believe that the artist is breaking yet another code of ethics: the law (see comment regarding: give credit where credit is due). Again, you give credit to a violinist at a concert, whynot a laborer? Or at least when an art work is in a gallery it states KaiKai Kiki LLC as the artist and not Takashi Murakami.
*his factory parallels that of warhols, only it appears as if his is taken to another level. I despise the argument, "well Warhol did it before him! It's been done before!" simply because it is one thing to have an idea done, but another to have an idea done again, and yet another to have an idea done again again, etc.
*he employs international artists. This confuses me a little. I am curious what their relationship is to Takashi. Are they part of the factory because they WANT to be, or do they feel like they HAVE to be so that the can generate more revenue for themselves. Is this a collaboration in which everyone has equal conceptual input, or is this just TM hiring international artists because he pays well? Again, why are they not mentioned in exhibitions when title cards are attributing work to artists? Or why isn't TM's name replaced with KaiKai Kiki LLC?
*"There is nothing wrong with factory-produced key-chains, plush toys, oversized sculptures or lousylumpy paintings. In fact, this is a reliable response to a consumerist, art-depraved Japanese public"--to me, this has an inherent assumption--that the US is not art-depraved. I think this is difficult to say... but instead of dealing with tricky terms and categories such as contemporary or folk art and talking about the Midwest vs the coasts, I want to point one confusing conflict in the article: he is adopting the art style and content of japan, which japan is obsessed with, yet japan is art-depraved. I don't understand, this seems like an unexplainable paradox to me. Additionally, to the 'commoner,' whom he seems to be reaching out to, there isn't a difference between TM's keychain and the Pokemon one next to it. They might be even unaware this is meant to be an artist act, so it is just read as... a toy. I am fine with folks getting whatever they get from an artwork--they don't have to know it's even "art," per se. But this gesture is inherently paradoxical, since the lines being blurred are so explicitely blurred.
"Profit-maximizing practices for the art community create more exposure, less work, and more product. Is not producing more what this is about? How can an artist reach a broad base without gathering an obsessed following? That is how manga and anime became popular" I don't see this as helping turn people around (again supposing this is a gesture to "convert" people into art lovers), this is basically getting people to accept what they have already accepted. I agree that for an artist to get an obsessed following would be a fairly incredible gesture, but this isn't an artist getting a huge following, this is like Walmart getting a huge following.
*That is the beauty of a factory. He is able to appeal to the consumerist public he faces while maintaining face." what is beautiful to one person is a problem for another I guess. The face is the problem.
"He utilizes the consumerist agenda to undermine it. Is it really possible to live by the sword and destroy it before it comes back around to kill you?" First, he doesn't utilize it, he just is it. As said before, he doesnt have the same sort of introspection that I see in Rauschenberg. I think that the question asked is a good one, and even has me come around. Indeed TM does ask this troubling question and ventures in that unsettling territory. Though as soon as I said, "unsettling territory," I couldn't help but feel that it was not all that unsettling. Maybe in the 70s or early 90s, but in the late 2000s, it just seems like it is our Zeitgeist. And here we have again my far too frequent complaint that TM isn't mimicing this or that, but just IS it.
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