Bye Bye Little Boy
Abstract
It is just six years since the Japan Society in New York put on Takashi Murakami's "Little Boy" exhibition, a stylish sampling and remix of Japanese contemporary art produced since the early 1990s. Acting as curator and star of his own show, Japan's best-known contemporary artist put pedophilic images on pristine white walls and plastic elephants and dung in Central Park. The catalogue he edited is a DIY sociology of postwar Japan as reflected by comic strips and the culture of sci-fi obsessed otaku (nerds). The Japan Society had a smash hit on its hands, riding a wave of neo-Japonisme that for a while made manga, anime and J-pop the hippest things in town. No one stopped to wonder if Murakami's selection was representative and good enough, or indeed if his clever packaging of Japan wasn't really all just © MURAKAMI, as his later world-touring solo retrospective was called (...).
Origin : Explicit agreement for this submission