Hooves on the Turf

The thing is, standing in front of a perfectly smooth swathe of solid paint can leave you feeling completely nourished, and being in the midst of craftsmanship can really get you excited. So of course Murkami’s show at Brooklyn Museum was inspiring. It was brilliant. But I’m not a big fan of Murakami’s style. I appreciate his full submission to the power of colors and the drama of simple shapes, his unwavering tribute to aesthetics, and I appreciate more than anything his commitment to perfection, but I’m not in any way blown away by his vision. From a friend of a friend who worked for him (many of the pieces she worked on were up), I know that an outrageous amount of work from various people have gone into the show, which is only evident.

Most of all, I was blown away by the production of the exhibit itself – from the statue in the lobby to the extravagant walls. What I loved the best was the black wall of the area that housed a series of three statues, each depicting a stage in which a female character (I forget her name) transforms into a robot in flight. I suppose it is typical of Murakami that her most private part struts out all the way in the front and forms the nose of the plane… Anyhow, I didn’t care much for the streaks of lightning across the black wall, but the border all along the top, made of round shapes in varying sizes and opacity, was really endearing.

Speaking of private parts forming the nose of a plane, someone is bound to ask what is art and what is not. I personally don’t care for the question (or the answer) at all. I just think it’s probably not bad to walk into a museum and see statues of two anime figures, one of a female with ballooning breasts squirting an orbit of milk around her, and another of a male squirting an orbit of his milk from his you know what. Don’t think that’s bad deal at all, not for $10 bucks anyway.

Some of my favorite paintings were the gigantic ones, most of them in the Beatrice and Samuel A. Seaver Gallery and Donald and Mary P. Oenslager Gallery. The ones I liked tended to deviate in small ways from what is considered his signature style. I’m holding one of them in the left postcard, which by the way was steeply priced at $2.75 a piece. But it wasn’t the postcards that were pimping. There was one counter with a showcase of Murakami-designed YSL accessories, where staff dressed in all white strutted the stuff.