ArtForum review from Takashi Murakami
artforum.com/archive/id=...arch=takashi

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Author: Jan Tumlir

10.29.07-02.11.08 The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Los Angeles
04.04.08-07.13.08 Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn

The exhibition title, “© Murakami,” flatly announces the post-Warholian position Takashi Murakami aims to occupy on the broken borderline between art and popular culture. Rendering his name a generic consumer brand, Murakami claims the benefits of intellectual property while hedging his work against the collective comic-book and video-game imaginary from which it springs. Others would sink under the weight of such a paradox, but Murakami soars—this is corporate-capitalist gnosticism, Hieronymus Bosch for the digital age, figuring a “superflat” reality squashed between angelic overworld and demonic underworld. Bringing together more than ninety paintings, objects, films, and installations made since the early 1990s, this exhaustive midcareer retrospective will provide a welcome opportunity to see how it all adds up, whether it does, and even whether it should.
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