Okay, I'll try and suss this out. I went to the Murakami opening (NOT the one with Kanye West, mind you) and was actually more interested in things than I thought I would be. Six years ago I thought Murakami was the shit, but then a few years later I went to a show of his paintings and was a little distressed at the completely air-tight production methods used to create his paintings, which made his paintings seem like toys. I understand that he has this "superflat" concept, but to me it just seems like he's trying to have it every which way possible. There is no reason for a painting to exist if it looks like a gigantic seemless screenprint. It's sort of an inversion of Andy Warhol. He uses high tech methods to design these paintings, and an army of animation-cell-type-painters to execute them, and they are utterly flawless paintings except for the fact that (aside from some admittedly very savvy use of scale) there is no reason to actually see them in person. I guess the aspect of this that seems slightly dubious in my opinion is that they are still hand-painted, and therefore demand immense sums of money.
I'm not really a sculptor, so I don't appreciate sculptures to the same degree. So, ironically, I tend to think his sculptures are more interesting
because they look like gigantic toys; however I'm mainly interested in the work he's made with human figures (like the guy making a lasso out of sperm, or the woman with the huge tits playing jumprope with her breast milk --which are fascinating and dirty and ballsy). I don't understand his whole personal mythology and i"m not about to invest in it because it just seems like blue-chip anime/manga stuff that I'm not that into. Some of his new sculptures are very impressive and pretty awesome. All of the non-LV work in the show would be great to go see on a date where one could drop references to anime, japanese screen painting, buddhism, walt disney, andy warhol, etc. The one LV-specific painting I saw was terrible.
I may just have an irrational beef with L.V. because it seems to be everywhere. Vanessa Beecroft is a particularly odious artist, in my opinion, and I recently came across a terrible book that she made in collaboration with Louis Vuitton. The bags all look cheap and tacky to me, even though they are extremely expensive. It seems like some kind of twisted joke, and on second thought, it probably is. It's almost like he's deliberately designing the ugliest things imaginable to test how well his branding exercise is going. It remains a mystery to me, Laurie, why you would so vehemently dislike Damian Hirst and say that he is full of shit, and yet celebrate this nonsense.
As for Kidrobot, in general I'm not really a fan of any toy-as-sculpture stuff (and yet for some reason I enjoy giant-sculptures-that-look-like-toys I guess), but not philosophically, just aesthetically. Having said that, some of that stuff is cool, and some of it not so much. In general I'm more in favor of spending a couple hundred bucks on a non-established artists drawings/paintings/sculptures than on a luxury multiple handbag or vinyl figurine or whatnot. I'm not against this stuff on principal, I just can never bring myself to think they're worth buying. Like I always covet those Yoshimoto Nara dog-in-a-teacup things, and sometimes seriously consider getting one, but then it just seems so decadent, even if it is cheaper than any "real" Nara painting would ever be. I actually think Murakami has designed a lot of cool merch and toys (all of which are on display at the show), but I actually think, just in terms of cartooning, composition, color, etc., he's a little too intellectual and cold. His main genius is business. If he was selling $50 backpacks at the gift shop I'd be all about it (incidentally, there is the regular MOCA gift shop open
in addition to the LV store in this exhibit---thus making the LV merch "art". This is another thing that irritates me, the insistence that all this is somehow a critique or an ingenious play on the relationship with art and commerce. Or that creating and exploiting it to its fullest this relationship somehow makes Murakami more interesting and not just more rich). I think I could keep going on, but that's enough for now. Where's Richard from Chi?
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*changing diapers I guess.
