Murakami's lineage.

Miss ko2 can be yours for an estimated $300k to $400k. Takashi Murakami's painted fiberglass sculpture is up for auction at Christie's on the evening of May 14. "In one sense we were recreating an unknown world, the world of the otaku, in a new context," says the Poku artist in an interview that gets sampled for a piece in Model Graphics which is, in turn, extracted for Christie's catalog page.

There's no way that page is going to get away with not mentioning Warhol, and dutifully, it does. But there is, tellingly, no mention of Jeff Koons. Voice art critic Jerry Saltz gets caught up in the Warhol connection as well, entitling his review of the exhibition Takashi Murakami: The Meaning of the Nonsense of the Meaning back in 1999 "Imitation Warhol." And he gets in a terrific paragraph at the end:

You should look at Murakami's art shamelessly, celebrate its seductiveness and clarity, and even adore it. But also hope that he stops trying so hard to make art. In spite of his nod to popular culture, Murakami has fallen far behind it. Too satisfied with too little, his fatal attraction to the art world keeps him returning to the surface. He's forgotten that surface is a thousand miles deep.

That's a zinger of a last line, a moving zinger, even. But how "far behind" pop culture was he really in 1997 when he created Miss ko2? It's hard to look at Miss ko2 and not think of Koons's Michael Jackson and Bubbles. For one thing, it redraws the line a bit between Warhol and Murakami. By making surface the subject of his art, Warhol whiplashed an art world immersed in abstract expressionism into the realization that realism was the true abstract. And though Warhol's real world was mediated, his art nonetheless took as its subjects the tangible objects of that world: Hollywood stars, newspaper photos, soup cans.

With Michael Jackson, Koons took this a step further, imagining for the subject itself the idyll he wanted his own being to embody. Koons, in 1988, mediates a mediation of a real human being, not the real human himself, in much the same way that allegorical Medieval art was meant as a constant reminder that real reality is not to be experienced in this world. But here's the icky part. Sometime between the video for Scream, with all its "loving the alien" black culture influences and anime-inspired storyboards, and the moment, probably in 2000, the flesh-n-blood Michael Jackson himself would begin to try to restructure his own body to appropriate an idyllic face as determined by decades' worth of evolution within the world of anime, Murakami decides to call that idyll into a third dimension.

Seems timely enough.

By the way. If you think there's something a tad spooky about Miss ko2, wait'll you see this. Via Natsume Maya.



Posted by dwhudson at May 7, 2003 4:00 PM