The Daily Swarm

(Takashi Murakami’s latest Kanye West cover via RapUp)

LA Times: Kanye West, neo-Pop star:

Fresh from a performance at the Dubai Country Club, Kanye West fit right in at Sunday’s gala opening of the Takashi Murakami retrospective at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. The sharp-dressed rapper-artiste, who enlisted the Japanese art star to create videos and album art for his latest release, “Graduation,” would have been perfectly comfortable mingling with the designers and socialites packed into the exhibition’s Louis Vuitton store. But by performing a super-compressed set that had that crowd setting their Motorola V3 cellphones alight, he claimed his own place within Murakami’s neo-Pop movement.

Jean-Michel Basquiat put hip-hop on museum walls decades ago. West takes the next step, his arty-commercial songs breaking the same barriers Murakami seeks to eradicate with his smart cartoons. Ambitiousness unites them too. West demonstrated his Sunday in a turbo-fueled performance, assisted by his all-female mini-orchestra, two backup singers, a DJ and a keyboardist, although he occupied the stage for less than half an hour.

(Kanye’s MOCA pics)

L.A. Times: Around Murakami’s Superflat world:

The retrospective also comes six years after the 2001 MOCA show that Murakami curated and which loudly announced his Superflat theory of Japanese art to a Western audience. Murakami’s big idea was to see postwar anime and manga as the progeny of the 17th and 18th century Edo era’s two-dimensional artistic techniques. He merged those flat patterns with modern decoration to create a specifically Japanese postmodern aesthetic.

The resulting canon—with gravity-defying sculptures of bazooka-breasted women, cuddly figurines, abstract paintings of mushrooms, digital animation and, oh yes, his famous Louis Vuitton accessories—has become highly coveted by contemporary art collectors and speculators. The Murakami brand now commands some of the highest of those unearthly prices being fetched in the frenzied bazaar that is the contemporary art market.

Murakami has never been shy about moving merchandise, and the volume is sustained by a cadre of artists at his company, Kaikai Kiki. But he remains a controversial figure in Japan. The idea of producing fine art as a collective project offended Japan’s insular art establishment. And there were plenty of cries of “sellout” in 2003 when Murakami took up Louis Vuitton designer Marc Jacobs’ offer to splash some colorful Superflat flowers and decoration onto the company’s famously brown bags.

But Murakami has been single-minded about seeing art as an enterprise. His most recent book is called “The Theory of Art Entrepreneurship.” He’s the artist as CEO.