©MURAKAMI — now playing at MOCA — is the blockbuster retrospective of artist (and Walt Disney reincarnate) Takashi Murakami.

The show has earned notoriety for including not only the usual museum shop stuffed with artist merchandise, but also a gallery which is a fully functional Louis Vuitton store selling thousand-dollar Murakami handbags, and another gallery configured as a retail display case for the artist’s lower-end products.

Framing MOCA as a traditional museum space for presenting art objects, the show represents not only yet another crowded blockbuster but also a new low in the commercialization of visual culture.

But reframing MOCA as a neutral site which can be temporarily transformed into any kind of social space, the Murakami show functions not only as a presentation of visual art but also as a representation of the social phenomenon of commercial art.

In this perspective the viewer experience crucially depends on the presence of a crowd looking at the art, watching the anime, and — depending on their class — buying handbags from the boutique or knickknacks from the gift shop.

And so it does: for those with ears to hear, the ka-ching of a cash register in a museum gallery is not the same as one in a mall outlet. The sound gets neatly delimited by critical air quotes.

This is supported by a comment from the curator, who has said about the boutique that “the visitor’s relationship to that part of the show is the action that takes place in it."

Additional support comes from a nice bit of temporal assemblage by the MOCA programmers: the show immediately following Murakami’s is a retrospective of Allan Kaprow, who would rightly identify the show preceding his as one big happening.


©MURAKAMI
10.29.07 - 2.11.08
MOCA @ The Geffen Contemporary

Allan Kaprow - Art As Life
02.23.08 - 06.30.08
MOCA @ The Geffen Contemporary