Apr

13

Murakami, “the Japanese Warhol.” I Just Don’t Get It.

Filed Under Art Fart 

Murakami Warhol No Way

 

 

 

Ever since the Murakami show opened at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the press has repeatedly extracted an aspect of the artist I just don’t understand. Namely, that Murakami is “the Japanese Warhol.” 1

What?

Whether blogs are referring to The New York Times comparison, or The Times quoting director and curator heavyweights at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and more (and the cyclone of oddity taking shape) makes me wonder how the comparison became an accepted truth, and even, undisputed fact.

In an article for New York, Jerry Saltz, used the Warhol-Murakami comparison to make a larger statement about art and commercialism in general.

“Murakami’s supporters call him ‘the Japanese Warhol.’ They say he’s enacting Warhol’s deal-making dictums that ‘good business is the best art’ and ‘business art is the step that comes after Art.’ He has his own ‘factory’ where assistants make his paintings, his Kaikai Kiki company represents a brood of Murakami clones, and he’s engaged in product design. To his credit, Murakami’s eagerness to outmarket everyone makes artists like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons seem decorous by comparison. But Murakami has fallen into his own trap. He didn’t heed one other Warhol bon mot, ‘Commercial things really do stink. As soon as it becomes commercial for a mass market, it really stinks.’ Murakami is no longer playing the market; the market is playing him—and so many others.” 2

Saltz has been one of the few critical minds out there who used the production aspect of Murakami’s art-making as the fundamental basis of the comparison. (Others have trodden on the idea of pop imagery, colour palette, and the animated-illustrative aspect; all weak contenders in my point of view, really isolating certain art works between Murakami and Warhol, and not their body of work in general.) But Murakami isn’t the first post-Warhol artist to venture into the world of the multiple (where art meets commerce) or where the artwork produced was the equivalent of the artist’s signature itself.

Keith Haring’s dancing man has been storming all over the world from subway murals to T-shirts, buttons and postcards almost immediately after he was recognized as an artist. (In fact, galleries loved the marketability of Haring’s stuffs for their shops during his exhibitions, and all year round.) Haring had repetition, and made his characters come to life on many mediums. He didn’t have to take the 50s, 60s iconography of soup cans and scrubbing pads Warhol adapted to comment on the big boxing of culture and people. Haring put his iconography among the people, (graffiti, the classic non-repeat, repeat) so the multiple and the multiplied became one, each making a comment on one another.

And what about Roy Lichtenstein? His art literally came out of comic books, to the point where he used the multiplicity in printing, the tiny recording of Benday dots, as his official mark in making art. Although Lichtenstein raised comics into a level of art, it can be argued, that the pulpy funnies, were an extension, a manufacturing of, Lichtenstein’s work, even though the process occurred in the reverse (first comics than art, rather than, art, then comics.) Why? Because Lichtenstein probably has been the largest producer of comic-inspired art works, at once blurring the lines of manufacturing art between him and Marvel or Diamond Comics, for example. Factory or no factory.

Production is what yields quantity, and quantity, multiplicity.

Multiplicity is about assimilating, not distinguishing, and Murakami does neither. His art is not entrenched in existing ideas and images of culture, and his method is not singular or specific. He is however “pop,” but not in a Warhol way, Haring, Lichtenstein or more.

Murakami, is “the Japanese Tennant.” The Don Tennant of Leo Burnett who created Tony the Tiger, the Jolly Green Giant, the Keebler Elves, and defined the Marlboro Man as the rugged Lorne-Green-like character most people know him by today. The creator behind what Burnett defined as the “‘critters’ – the anthropomorphic figures created to put familiar faces on prosaic packaged-goods products – to build brand identities that would appeal to consumers.” 3

Unlike Leo Burnett, Murakami has exchanged Kellogg for Louis Vuitton, Marlboro for Marc Jacobs. His factory, in actuality, is an agency, making Murakami more an ad exec, than artist, and as Saltz suggests, perhaps his agency’s biggest client too.

Let’s just hope, the retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, makes a milestone out of Murakami’s fifteen minutes.

1 Deal or No Deal, Takashi Murakami’s show is nakedly commercial; “Underdog” strikes an opposite pose, to much the same effect | By Jerry Saltz | New York | Published May 24, 2007

2 Deal or No Deal, Takashi Murakami’s show is nakedly commercial; “Underdog” strikes an opposite pose, to much the same effect | By Jerry Saltz | New York | Published May 24, 2007

3 Don Tennant, Creator of Characters for Ads, Is Dead at 79 | By Stuart Elliott | The New York Times | Published December 13, 2001

Post post, The New Yorker, weighs in.

IMAGE Murakami Warhol No Way | By ANS | 2008

 

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