Even if you aren’t personally familiar with famed Japanese contemporary artist Takashi Murakami, you have surely seen his work. The pop
Even if you aren’t personally familiar with famed Japanese contemporary artist Takashi Murakami, you have surely seen his work.
The pop artist’s brightly colored signature characters have appeared on everything from limited edition Louis Vuitton bags to Supreme shirts to Vans skateboarding shoes.
Having collaborated with celebrities like Drake, Kanye West and Billie Eilish, and institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and Gagosian, Murakami is, without a doubt, one of the biggest “conventional” artists to try their hand at making nonfungible tokens (NFTs). Despite this, his projects still haven’t blown up to the extent of other prominent contemporary artists like Beeple.
Many are convinced that is set to change, claiming Murakami’s flowers are well on their way to becoming as iconic as CryptoPunks and Bored Apes. After a hotly anticipated but ultimately disappointing NFT launch that coincided with the 2022 crypto collapse, the artist is finally having another go at the medium. A new exhibit at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum shows how Murakami creates original tokens from scratch.
High art and low art
While many take Murakami’s flowers at face value, there is more to them than meets the eye. Inspired by the postwar Japan in which he grew up, these deceptively jolly icons critique the perversion and violence that underscore the country’s otaku and kawaii subcultures.
The stylized imagery of these cultures is becoming increasingly popular in western countries thanks to the export of Japanese manga, anime and video games, and Murakami — taking a page out of Andy Warhol’s book — exposes the commercialization of these mediums by way of embracing and even exploiting them. His studio isn’t so much a studio as it is a full-fledged factory, operated by 25 assistants who help him satisfy the demand for his personal brand.
Unifying Murakami’s scattered oeuvre is his “Superflat” theory, which not only refers to the two-dimensional quality that bridges traditional Japanese visual culture to its contemporary counterparts, but also to the idea that Japan, as a society, makes little distinction between “high” and “low” art — between the art you find in a museum and the art you find on billboards or the pages of a manga.
This, Murakami says, is in stark contrast to the West, where professional critics decide what kind of creative output deserves to be displayed in galleries and what does not. Presently, NFTs are still largely relegated to the second group — a classification he hopes to change.
After finding huge success with traditional media, uncontrollable events and poor timing conspired against the artist’s NFT efforts. Murakami’s first flowers launched right before the downfall of FTX, causing their value to plummet from $260,000 to just $2,200 per token on OpenSea. Displaying a level of humility seldom seen in the worlds of both art and crypto, Murakami paused his sales and apologized to his investors.
He followed up this apology with a lengthy statement saying he would take a step back from the NFT marketplace and figure out how to create digital art that matched the value of its real-world counterparts. He asked himself the kinds of questions that confuse the non-initiated. Should he use ERC-721 or 1155? Did he need IPFS or independent smart contracts? What about opening his own physical storefront?
Unfamiliar people
The crypto collapse left a mixed impression on Murakami, who will be exploring his frustration with the volatility of the metaverse in an exhibit he calls “Unfamiliar People — Swelling of Monsterized Human Ego.” Running from Sept. 15, 2023, until Feb. 12, 2024, it largely consists of mixed media pieces depicting humanoid monsters.
Influenced by traditional ukiyo-e woodblock prints, his familiar kawaii style, and even Spanish painter Francisco Goya’s nightmarish painting “Saturn Devouring His Son” (which a young Murakami remembers seeing on a museum trip with his parents), the distorted figures presented in Murakami’s exhibit comment on the corroding influence of digital technology: the relentless self-promotion on social media and the adulterating anonymity of internet message boards.
His core theme — the swelling ego — not only applies to toxic online discourse but also to the mismanagement of media personalities like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Bankman-Fried, whose irresponsible behavior has tarnished the reputations of entire industries and technologies.
Despite his negative experiences with making and selling NFTs, Murakami isn’t pessimistic. He believes the crypto collapse, far from bursting an already oversized bubble, will go down in financial…
cointelegraph.com
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