consumerism and art
As art would no longer respond to itself, and no longer had any constraints, other human activities could be drawn from the world into its hungry maw. Art was no longer moving forward. Individual artists were free to consume the present, swallow other cultural forms, and twist them into new experiences.
Dean Kissick • The Painted Protest, by Dean Kissick
Murakami points out that his transformation partly the result of Japan's long recession. The bubble burst in the early '90s, creating a generation that faced a level of economic uncertainty unknown since the '50s. Murakami feels that Japan's long celebration of consumerism has turned to critique.
"The Japanese people get fed TV and media for 24... See more
"The Japanese people get fed TV and media for 24... See more
artnet.com Magazine Features - Superflat
The the autocratic reign of the market economy assumes that it's incredibly difficult to escape, that the market economy has control over every aspect of our lives, including the creative or relational spaces. De Boer argues that what this does is reduce reality. our lived experience of the world, to an endless supply of commodifiable fragments,
... See more‘when culture becomes nothing more than a commodity, it must also become the star commodity of the spectacular society’ – Debord, Thesis 193, the society of the spectacle 1967
Murakami’s 2017 exhibition at MCA titled “The Octopus eats its Own Leg” was a sold-out showing of his most influential works (Blay, 2018). The saying “Octopus Eats its Own Leg” refers to a situation where an octopus self-cannibalises to survive dire times, knowing the leg will grow back (Murakami et all, 2017). In the context of Murakami’s work,
... See moreJacobs, for his part, reserved his most insightful comment for the Bilbao portion of the tour. “It has been, and continues to be, a monumental marriage of art and commerce,” he said then. “The ultimate crossover—one for both the fashion and art history books.”
The Complete Backstory of the Louis Vuitton x Murakami Collection
You remember that idea from romanticism, that which is simply too great to be contemplated as a whole and makes us feel humanly insignificant in the face of it, and so forth. But what happens in a lot of the spectacular work of the 90s and 2000s is it was designed to be easily understood in the shortest amount of time, to be visually consumed in an
... See moreBut this obviously contributed to a feeling of decline in the long-run, because mass culture continued to do the thing it always does: avoid artistic innovation in order to maximize profit. But once poptimism established that only the mainstream "mattered," it set up audiences to judge the health of culture on its least artistic output. If we have... See more
The Missing Piece in Conversations about “Cultural Decline”
The relationship was especially controversial because of its unabashed commercialist core, and came to a critical head in 2007, the year the artist’s show “© Murakami,” a 1,000-square-foot popup store offering $960 Louis Vuitton handbags, opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Art critics like Dave Hickey bemoaned the way “the... See more