Sampling the globe

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"Business art is the step that comes after Art," according to Warhol, who also claimed that "making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art." Said Jeff Koons some fifteen years ago, "A lot of my work is about sales." He adds, "I want to have an impact on people's lives. I want to communicate to as wide a mass as possible." The answer for him was TV and advertising because "the art world is not effective right now." For a more recent case in point, look no further than Takashi Murakami's international empire of merchandise based in New York, Paris, and Tokyo and visible far beyond the boundaries of the art world. Large kitschy works like Reversed Double Helix, installed at Rockefeller Center in 2003, of course offer visibility, but other projects have reached an even larger audience--for instance, the recent collaboration with Marc Jacobs/Louis Vuitton, a project all the more visible because cheap knockoffs of the handbag are sold by street vendors the world over and thus pushed to new levels of supervisibility along the networks of global capitalism. Nobody was particularly impressed with Murakami's official entry at the last Venice Biennale, but the overwhelming presence of his bags on the city's streets, alleys, and bridges was analyzed in these pages as a novel form of market penetration. That, of course, is also Koons's favored vocabulary. He manipulates and he penetrates, and he is eager to place his operation in a tradition of Pop: "To me, Andy presented Duchampian ideas in a manner the public was able to embrace. Where I differ is that Warhol believed you could penetrate the mass through distribution and I continue to believe you penetrate the mass with ideas." And Murakami's penetration? Just global distribution or even a few ideas?

"We want to see the newest things. That is because we want to see the future," writes Murakami in "A Theory of Super Flat Japanese Art," his 2000 essay describing a specific painterly sensibility and attraction to two-dimensionality that has given rise not only to a tradition of very flat art from Tokyo but also to an entirely new form of Japanese existence, which probably has its equivalent in other parts of the world--perhaps in every part of the world. In Murakami's view, the integration of the entertainment industry and the art world is yielding not only flat artworks but, more important, a new superflat image: "Us." Who are the "us" of superflatness, one might ask? I used to think that the flattest things around were the flowery wall paintings of Lily van der Stokker and the Nintendo paintings of Michel Majerus, but perhaps the two-dimensionality of Japanese superflatness is even more extreme than these European latecomers to Pop. Murakami's lineage involves not only classical Japanese artists from previous centuries, such as Kano Sansetsu and Katsushika Hokusai, but also contemporary artists working with animation, manga culture, and music videos. In "The Super Flat Manifesto" (2000), he claims that "the world of the future might be like Japan is today--super flat."