Takashi Murakami at Marianne Boesky - New York

Art in America, Jan, 2004 by Paul Mattick

"Business art is the step that comes after Art," Andy Warhol wrote in 1975. What he meant was that he was abandoning the idea of the artist as alienated creative individual to run his studio as an enterprise turning out a range of products marked by a recognizable visual style and signature. Takashi Murakami has imitated Warhol in calling his studio a "factory"; in this exhibition he might have been seen as paying tribute to the Pop master by hanging sets of images, identical but for color, that evoke Warhors "Flowers" in different colors and dimensions or his Campbell's soup cans. Like the latter, Murakami's images featured a product logo, in this case the Louis Vuitton monogram.

Murakami has, however, carried Warhol's idea to another level. He has not "appropriated" the LV label, but is actually working for the company, under the aegis of designer Marc Jacobs. His exhibition was inextricably connected with the company's spring line of handbags, which bore his reworking of the venerable logo in his "Superflat" style, produced to accompany Jacobs's clothing line for the company. Gallery-owner Marianne Boesky, in an interview, stressed the art character of the handbags, claiming democratic implications for Murakami's crossing of the art/business boundary: "For Murakami, everyone should have access to art, especially those who are not necessarily cultured." At any rate, she might have added, those with an extra thousand dollars or so.

The central totem of the exhibition was a 100-inch-tall fiberglass panda, standing on an antique Vuitton trunk that served as a pedestal, with green and violet cherry blossoms on his ears and Murakami's signature eyeballs--elements also used on the bags. The panda reappeared in a video depicting the adventures of a little girl who wanders into an LV store while trying to call her pals on a cell phone; swallowed by the panda, she falls, in a beautifully animated swirl of colors and shapes, into a luxury-consumer wonderland. Her child's cuteness protects her from any trauma; after finding her friends in the ever-never land of the global shopping city, she shares a last loving glance with the lovable monster that swallowed her up and spewed her out.

Like the video and the sculpture, the panel paintings included in the show were exquisitely made by Murakami's teams of assistants. All together these objects conjure up a world whose decorative charm bears a disturbing dark side, thanks to the constant repetition of elements, patterns and characters--like the panda, suspended between the frightening and the cute--that suggests a seamless environment from which lack of disposable income might be the only escape. A premodern court artist like Velazquez treasured the knighthood that assimilated him to the nobility; Rubens was an ambassador as well as a celebrator of his royal and religious patrons. Now, at the end of a period in which artists typically saw themselves in various sorts of opposition to the bourgeoisie, we have a court painter at ease with modernism's contribution to the visual culture of today's rulers. The court is global and corporate; when I asked Murakami recently what he was going to do next, he replied, "Work on the fall collection."