When one thinks of ‘fine art’, thoughts rarely stray into the realm of accessible collectability. Of course, the fabulously rich might own an original Lichtenstein or three, but there isn’t too much in the way of fine art for the average collector. Warhol’s pop art introduced the idea of mass production to the fine arts, but modern pop surrealist Takashi Murakami takes it even further, involving the collectible culture into his aesthetic, his products, and his philosophy. How many fine artists turn their creations into figures?

You’ve probably seen Murakami’s gleefully smiling flowers somewhere, or his Mickey Mouse-ish signature character, DOB. These finely defined figures strongly reference Japanese animation and the early influence that Walt Disney has has on the cartoon aesthetic. All of Murakami’s lines are crisp and clean, bringing the idea of cartooning onto canvasses lining the Brooklyn museum, mixing the artforms, and presenting an awesome show.

The Brooklyn Museum hasn’t just lined up some paintings in a room and invited people in. They’ve assembled an experience. An entire labyrinthine floor of the museum is dedicated entirely to Murakami’s works. If there’s a series of paintings with a cartoon eye theme, the room will be covered floor-to-ceiling with Murakami-designed cartoon eye wallpaper, and the floor will be patterned with eye decals. This happens in an overwhelming room after room, designed to emulate the experience of walking through an obsessive, terminally cheerful cartoon. Some of the paintings and prints are small, and some of the prints and paintings are vast, and almost all of them elaborate on the idea of ‘cartooning’.

The main floor of the museum was decorated with an enormous quintet of sculptures, posed around a circle in a pseudo-religious fashion. Of course, their cartoonishness and reference to animation divorces them from complete seriousness, but the overall impression is that such immense fiberglass statues imply a certain seriousness in these cartoon forms. An inflatable DOB hovers towards the ceiling, an obvious homage to Jeff Koons’ famous inflatable rabbit. Unfortunately, no photography was allowed inside of the exhibit.

Please don’t let the overwhelmingness of cartoons fool you into bringing the kids to this exhibit, as there are five exceptionally explicit life-sized sculptures of nude and provocative anime-type people – nude women transforming into fighter planes (which makes for a great mixing of Japanese erotic animation and Transformers), and grossly exaggerated figures in other sensual acts. I won’t go into detail, but one of the more personally enjoyable parts of the show was standing back and witnessing peoples’ reactions as they walked past – usually very quickly, with their heads down and red-faced.

In the midst of this exhibit, planted between rooms, was the Louis Vuitton / Murakami gift shop, an integral part of the show experience. It mixed the idea of viewing art with the idea of producing and collecting art by introducing this marketplace as part of the show. Couple this with the showroom that included an under-glass, shop-like display of products that Murakami has designed or been associated with, and you have a man who has embraced collector culture as part of his artform. Sure, the main gift shop has flower pillows that cost upwards of $150, but it also had Murakami-designed dolls that were being clutched lovingly by young children.

As you exit the exhibit, a line of Murakami-designed figures are lined up in a case, spanning the variety of characters and styles he’s employed. He’s borrowing heavily from Japanese toy culture, and now he contributes back to it.

When CBS Sunday Morning did their part to overanalyze Murakami’s art and asked the artist himself what he wanted people to take away from the show, he simply replied the he wanted them to think, “Wow, that’s big!” It’s this kind of unpretentiousness that allows him to breach the strange gap between the fine artist and the audience, so I’ll just say simply, “Some of that stuff was really big!”

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 2:00 am and is filed under collecting fyi, events, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.