Pittsburgh, PA

COMPANY MAN: TAKASHI MURAKAMI AND THE ART OF ‘BUSINESS ART’

Wednesday, April 23 at 6-7:30pm in Kresge Hall (CFA), Carnegie Mellon University.

THE ART OF BUSINESS/BUSINESS AS ART:
A DISCUSSION ON BUSINESS AND ART WITH SCOTT ROTHKOPF, SENIOR EDITOR OF ARTFORUM

Delegation, agency, team production, monitoring, group entrepreneurship‹all these terms inform the division of labor in contemporary artistic production. The business of art is conducted much like any other commercial venture in which something is bought, sold, or traded, and yet a work of art is not a commodity in the ordinary sense. Its value can fluctuate radically in an instant, depending on the influence of collectors, dealers, curators, critics, or connoisseurs. What kinds of negotiations must an artist make in order to retain a critical and creative edge within a competitive art market? How have contemporary artists used “the market” as both a medium of art, as well as a place of profit and gain? Is there a difference between consumerist luxury items and the “products” that artists like Murakami (in particular, his Louis Vuitton purse replicas) and Maywa Denki (their Japanese high-end robotic toys) produce? What is the line between entrepreneurial innovation and artistic invention?

“Business art is the step that comes after Art,” Andy Warhol famously opined in 1975. Yet despite the recent explosion of the international art market and the crossover superstardom of figures such as Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, perhaps only one artist has truly taken Warhol at his word: Takashi Murakami. This lecture will explore Murakami’s far-flung “business art” endeavors and their relationship to his painting and sculpture, within the context of precedents including Dalí, Warhol, and Haring. A household name in his native Japan, Murakami (b. 1963) first gained international celebrity in 2002 with his series of Louis Vuitton handbags, which grossed more than three-hundred million dollars in their first year of sales alone.

Although this corporate collaboration may be his most well-known foray into the world of commerce, it is but one point in a constellation of activities that dwarfs his gallery-bound paintings and sculpture in administrative scope and market reach. In addition to churning out finely crafted artworks coveted by collectors, he is busy producing related mass-market merchandise; running his own art fair; managing the careers of young Japanese artists; planning group exhibitions; hosting a radio show; and pursuing commercial “collaborations” in the form of advertising and branding projects with the likes of rapper Kanye West all under the auspices of his own multinational corporation, Kaikai Kiki, Co., Ltd., a “business art” venture unlike any before it. Indeed, if Warhol provided the model, Murakami has broken the mold.

Scott Rothkopf is a senior editor of Artforum, as well as an art historian and critic. He has been a guest curator at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum, where he most recently co-organized “This Is Not a Time for Dreaming” (2004), a site-specific installation and film by the French artist Pierre Huyghe made in response to Le Corbusier’s only North American building, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. At the Fogg, he was also curator and catalogue author for the exhibition “Mel Bochner Photographs 1966¬1969″ (2002), which traveled to the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. As a frequent contributor to Artforum, Rothkopf has written on major exhibitions, including the Venice and Whitney biennials, and on artists such as Jeff Koons, Ed Ruscha, Sol LeWitt, Diller+Scofidio, Carroll Dunham, Josiah McElheny, T. J. Willcox, and Karen Kilimnik, who was the subject of his 2007 book, Period Eye: Karen Kilimnik’s Fancy Pictures, co-authored with Meredith Martin. His other museum and gallery catalogue contributions include monographic essays on Wade Guyton, Eva Hesse, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Kelley Walker, and Terry Winters, as well as text on Takashi Murakami for his current traveling retrospective, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Sponsored by the Office of the Provost, The School of Art, and the New Minor in Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Development.

For more information, contact Melissa Ragona, Assistant Professor of Art, School of Art, Carnegie Mellon University at mragona@andrew.cmu.edu.
Tel: (412) 779-9257

To read about other art events sponsored by Carnegie Mellon, check out my previous post here.

Pittsburgh, Takashi Murakami, Carnegie Mellon University, art, designer purses, commercial art