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It's a very ambitious and far-ranging project." And it's the way that he's worked as much as the work itself - in the public realm with public sculpture, huge editions of objects, merchandising, working collaboratively. It's all the disparate elements combined that speak to the moment. It's a blend of fantasy and apocalypse and innocence. "I think that his work embodies some interests that extend far beyond Japan. "He's a phenomenon, that's for sure," said Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. More than anyone else, he has put modern Japan on the map of the contemporary art world. Meanwhile, his monumental sculptures and silk-screened balloons of original cartoon characters, displayed in 2001 at Grand Central Terminal and in 2003 at Rockefeller Center, have made him conspicuous in New York. Ever since a Chicago collector paid $567,500 at auction in 2003 for his fiberglass sculpture of a long-legged waitress, Murakami, now 43, has held the price record for a work by a contemporary Japanese artist. In his own career, Murakami has moved frictionlessly among his multiple roles as artist, curator, theorist, product designer, businessman and celebrity. The blurring of high and low remains characteristic of Japanese society. The Japanese language didn't even have a word for "fine art" in 1868, when Japan embraced the West in the Meiji Restoration only afterward did the country import this foreign "art" notion and create a vocabulary for it.
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Downstairs you find dresses, bags and shoes, but on the 12th floor you find art." Indeed, it is one of Murakami's dearly held tenets that demarcations between fine art and popular merchandise are completely un-Japanese. I think it is the same for everyone of my generation. I saw Marcel Duchamp, Malevich and Man Ray in depth for the first time in that museum. It was thanks to the Seibu Museum, which no longer exists on the 12th floor of the Seibu department store, that I developed my knowledge of contemporary art. "We have had a long history of museums with department stores as a venue. "This back and forth doesn't seem unnatural to us," he said. When I asked Tomio Koyama, Murakami's dealer in Tokyo, why he hadn't shown the monogram work in his gallery, he explained, "In Japan, a gallery has no meaning, and a Louis Vuitton shop is a more powerful place to see something." The Tokyo art critic Noi Sawaragi, who was a crucial early supporter of Murakami and a peer, told me that I was imposing distinctions that no Japanese would make. If you want to understand why Murakami's art feels so dizzyingly up to date, this leveling of status grades among art, advertising and merchandise at Roppongi Hills is a good place to start. So, in Tokyo, an art museum was displaying luggage, a luggage shop was exhibiting art, an artist had developed a branding campaign - and nobody thought anything out of the ordinary. Last year at another Vuitton shop in Tokyo, Murakami displayed a large fiberglass sculpture and a four-panel screen painted in his LV monogram design. In the same development, at a large Vuitton store, new handbags in a cherry design by Murakami would soon be introduced, along with a couple of the artist's sculptures of a red, smiling cherry. Cute cartoonlike characters that he had created as branding elements for the center - Barney-like brontosaurs, droopy-eared rabbits and smiling aliens - grinned down on me from pennants and from express buses to Roppongi Hills.
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The handbags in the museum exhibition were hardly Murakami's only contribution to the Roppongi Hills complex of glass-and-steel towers. Murakami's handbags were presented along with two small paneled screens painted in the same patterns that appear on the bags. The brightly colored Murakami line has been phenomenally successful, with sales reported to be in the vicinity of $300 million. What drew me to the show, however, were two bags in the variation of the Vuitton pattern that the Japanese contemporary artist Takashi Murakami developed with the company in 2003. At the Mori Arts Center, which is perched atop a skyscraper in the glittering Roppongi Hills development in Tokyo, I recently visited a museum show, "Universal Symbol of the Brand," that displayed (to quote its catalog) "the fascinating development of the history and endeavors of Louis Vuitton, the brand that is not only incredibly popular in Japan but also beloved throughout the world." A sequence of galleries exhibiting luggage and handbags proceeded to a large advertising photograph of the actress Uma Thurman and smaller shots of runway models, all wearing Vuitton fashions.