Even if you are not personally familiar with the famous Japanese contemporary artist Takashi Murakami, you must have seen his work.
The pop artist’s brightly colored signature appears on everything from limited-edition Louis Vuitton bags to Supreme shirts to Vans skate shoes.
Murakami, who has collaborated with celebrities such as Drake, Kanye West, and Billie Eilish, as well as institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and Gagosian, is undoubtedly one of the biggest “traditional” artists trying to make non-fungible tokens (NFT). Still, his projects do not reach the scale of other prominent contemporary artists such as Beeple.
Many believe this is about to change, claiming that Murakami’s Flower is becoming as iconic as Cypherpunk and Boring Ape. After the highly anticipated but ultimately disappointing NFT release, just in time for the 2022 cryptocurrency crash, the artist is finally trying the medium again. A new exhibit at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco shows how Takashi Murakami created original tokens from scratch.
High Art vs. Low Art
Although many people only look at the surface value of Haruka Murakami, their connotations are far more than what they seem on the surface. Inspired by the post-war Japan he grew up in, the seemingly happy icons critique the perversion and violence that emphasizes the country’s otaku and kawaii culture.
Stylized images of these cultures have become increasingly popular in the West thanks to the export of Japanese manga, anime, and video games, and Takashi Murakami – borrowing from Andy Warhol’s book – embraces, even exposes, these media commercial exploitation of them. His studio is more of a full-fledged factory than a studio, run by 25 assistants who help him with his personal branding needs.
What unites Murakami’s scattered work is his theory of “superflatness,” which refers not only to the two-dimensional quality that links traditional Japanese visual culture to contemporary visual culture, but also to Japan as a society at a “high level.” and “high level” there is little difference. ’ and ‘low’ art – somewhere between the art in a museum and the art on a billboard or in the pages of a comic.
This, Murakami said, is in stark contrast to the West, where professional critics decide which creative output deserves to be shown in a gallery and which doesn’t. For now, NFTs still largely fall into the second category — a classification he hopes to change.
Uncontrollable events and bad timing have stymied an artist’s NFT efforts after massive success in traditional media. Murakami’s first flower launched before FTX’s downfall, causing its value on OpenSea to plummet from $260,000 to $2,200 per token. Showing a level of humility rare in the art world and the cryptocurrency world, Murakami suspended the sale and apologized to investors.
After apologizing, he issued a lengthy statement saying he would exit the NFT market and study how to create digital art that matches the value of its real-world counterparts. He asks himself questions that confuse a layman. Should he use ERC-721 or 1155? Does he need IPFS or standalone smart contracts? How about opening your own physical store?
stranger
Takashi Murakami, who has had mixed impressions on the cryptocurrency crash, will explore his frustration with the volatility of virtual worlds in an exhibition he calls “Stranger People — Monsterized Human Ego.” From September 15, 2023 to February 12, 2024, it will consist primarily of mixed-media compositions depicting humanoid monsters.
Influenced by traditional ukiyo-e, his familiar kawaii style, and even Spanish painter Francisco Goya’s nightmarish painting Saturn Devouring His Son (a painting the young Murakami remembers seeing while visiting the museum with his parents Influenced by paintings), Takashi Murakami’s works present distorted figures. Commenting on the Corrupting Effects of Digital Technology: Ruthless Self-Promotion on Social Media and Adulterated Anonymity on Internet Message Boards.
His central theme — the inflated ego — applies not only to toxic online rhetoric, but also to the mismanagement of media figures such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sam Bankman-Fried , their irresponsible behavior has damaged the reputation of the entire industry and technology.
Despite Murakami’s negative experience in making and selling NFTs, he is not pessimistic. He believes that far from popping an already oversized bubble, the cryptocurrency crash is a temporary setback that will go down in financial history.
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“Both economically and conceptually,” he told the magazine, “the current decline of virtual currencies just marks an unstable transition period. So I am not worried at all, and I am still running several NFT projects. It bridges the virtual universe and the real world.” He believes that “in the near future, with the rise of young critics and creators who understand this concept, NFT art will suddenly become common.”
In stark contrast to Takashi Murakami’s “Stranger People” series are his various physical re-imaginings of NFTs, including Takashi Murakami’s painterly renditions. Murakami created the paintings and previously sold them at Gagosian to help secure and stabilize the value of their NFTs, while the reserve price for NFTs on OpenSea remains “as low as possible.” Meanwhile, some paintings have sold for more than $70,000.
Also featured in the exhibition are digital avatar sculptures made by Takashi Murakami in collaboration with RTFKT, a digital fashion and collectible organization known for its work on video game engines, blockchain authentication and augmented reality, and futuristic sneaker designs and famous.
Inspired by Snapchat Bitmoji, Murakami and RTFKT created more than 20,000 character models to represent players in online games, each with uniquely designed eyes, mouths, clothing and even behavioral traits. Murakami describes his sculptures as “robots”. Not only because it has a reflective silver surface engraved with mechanical patterns, but also because the digital avatar it’s based on is half human, half machine.
Changes in the value of contemporary art
When asked if making NFT art was any different than making “traditional” art, Murakami replied: Yes and no.
“Since Marcel Duchamp, contemporary art has clearly been a world of transcendental conceptual art,” he said, “so I think for fans of contemporary art, an understanding of the virtual universe comes naturally. I immediately understood And got into that worldview, but to my surprise, others didn’t follow. I think the biggest obstacle is the inability to change the value system of the contemporary art world, and the resulting reluctance to understand NFTs. Now, these two words Still completely separate.”
Currently, most Western critics do not consider NFT art to be art. Murakami said they found the images “poorly executed and childish” and insisted that “the concept of a virtual universe is a hoax.” Their distaste for NFTs — partly out of self-preservation — is so strong that they reject Murakami’s tokens while celebrating their drawn equivalents. Undoubtedly, the inflated ego of “The Stranger” also contains traces of these people.
Perhaps the Western art world should be more like Japan. There, the devastation of World War II and the subsequent occupation by the US military completely dismantled the country’s traditional social fabric. As a result, Murakami says, Japan finds itself “in a very unique situation where ‘high’ art cannot be established” because there is no elite claiming it to be theirs, and theirs alone. He added:
“In Japan, there is no distinction between high art and low art, and we’re obsessed with the idea that high art must also be brought down to low for everyone to enjoy.”
This, combined with “demand for images reminiscent of Japanese manga and anime,” suggests that Japan should have a rich and vibrant NFT market. However, this is not the case. Murakami said many Japanese artists — especially manga artists — were interested in making the switch but were prevented from doing so due to strict regulations that made such ventures unprofitable.
He explained: “The virtual currency ecosystem conceived by the Japanese government is so complex and negative that manga or anime creators are not attracted to leave their normal economic domain. Therefore, there is no prospect of NFT market development at all here.” sign.”
Things aren’t much better in the U.S. — at least not yet. While the crypto world is gradually recovering from the FTX fiasco, NFTs have yet to recover.
After peaking in January 2022, many coins plummeted. By September of that year, sales had all but disappeared, and so had demand. Takashi Murakami’s Flower isn’t the only NFT to raise its base price; BoredApes and CryptoPunks are in the same boat.
The current situation is so bad that many NFT creators don’t know what to do or where to go next. Takashi Murakami is a rare exception, but perhaps that’s because — as a well-known artist — his status and source of income aren’t exactly tied to tokens. For him, creating NFTs is both an artistic experiment and an act of embracing the future of creativity and commerce that he (and many others) still believe in.
Murakami really believed that. Years after he came up with the idea of ”super flat,” he argues that the digitization of art not only validates his theory, but draws it to its logical conclusion:
“I believe that with the pandemic, the era of the superflat is over, at least temporarily. The reason is because the online society is now fully consummated. In other words, the true superflat society is now a reality. With the virtual universe The rise of the Uncharted Regions will add more depth to an already decidedly flat society; we can say we are now heading towards a super-super-flat world.”
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