It’s not the futuristic
nude sculptures or trippy, Alice in Wonderland–style
magic mushrooms growing out of the floor that has tongues
wagging about the “Murakami” exhibition that
opens April 5 at the Brooklyn Museum. It’s the 550-square-foot
Louis Vuitton boutique, hawking $5,000 purses and $10,000
canvases within the show, which seems to be the real sensation.
“Truly, one of the key points of the exhibition is
Takashi Murakami’s direct engagement with many different
cultural spheres and mediums,” said Brooklyn Museum
Director Arnold Lehman. “The Louis Vuitton designs
are not offshoots, they are the work itself. The permanent
galleries are filled with objects that, in the past or in
current times, you could buy in retail stores.”
He cited silver from Tiffany and Herman Miller furniture,
and said, “We believe they represent the highest aesthetic
achievement of their historic period.”
Murakami, a Tokyo native, is best known in the art world
for pioneering “Super flat,” a combination of
anime and comic styles that flattens its subjects on a canvas.
To many people, however, he is known as the artist behind
the 2003 Vuitton line that featured smiling flowers, and
a later line that covered the classic monogrammed leather
in cartoon cherries. Additionally, Murakami has designed
album covers for Kanye West, the rapper who was scheduled
to perform — at press time — at Thursday’s
“Brooklyn Ball” in Murakami’s honor.
Walking through his exhibit, which sprawls through two floors
of the museum and even spills into the stairwells, it’s
hard not to concur with Lehman. While one could grumble
about the sullying of art through commerce, it takes little
more than a glance to see the same affect that “Tan
Tan Bo” — a manic, psychedelic painting that
reconfigures a comic book character — has can also
be achieved on a pricey handbag or a $40 T-shirt in the
museum’s own gift shop.
What Murakami’s selling isn’t leather goods
or clothing or stuffed animals, it’s a piece of his
Wonkaesque world, where teenage aliens fall in love with
classmates, and the artist’s alter ego, “DOB,”
bounces from frame to sensory-overload-inducing frame.
That’s what should have the borough crowing: the overwhelming,
exciting exhibit that — while not an original show,
it was imported from the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary
Art — is a large Technicolor feather in the Brooklyn
Museum’s cap.
Gallery surfaces are covered in unexpected ways —
the stairwells splashed with camouflage and a skull print,
another room’s floor is done up with cartoon cracks
— that make “Murakami” more than the sum
of its parts
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