Murakami Deepfakes Hiroshige
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| Takashi Murakami, 100 Famous Views of Edo: Japonisme Reconsidered—Moon Pine, Ueno, 2024-2025. The Broad |
The Broad has added its 14th work by Takashi Murakami. It's a nearly 10-ft. high silkscreen copy of a well-known Utagawa Hiroshige woodblock print, Moon Pine, Oeno. Murakami created it for a show at the Brooklyn Museum last year. He replicated all the prints of Hiroshige's series "100 Famous Views of Edo" at large scale. The resulting pictures incorporate silkscreen dot gradients and glitter, as well as brushstrokes evoking Manet's and van Gogh's interpretations of Hiroshige. Peeking out at upper left are Murakami's characters Kaikai and Kiki (who were surely a strong influence for Labubu). Murakami's Hiroshige copies are a capsule history of copying in Western and Asian art.
Oeno's Moon Pine, with its loop-the-loop branch, was a tourist attraction until felled by a typhoon. It has since been replaced by a new tree trained to the original's form.
The new Murakami is now on view at the Broad in an installation of four of the artist's works.
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Comments
Brooklyn has a splendid original.
> high silkscreen copy
Contemporary art isn't necessarily larger in scale compared with the past. There are plenty of huge paintings made centuries ago now displayed in the Louvre, etc.
However, the technical skill of artists of the past (sidestepping the issue of their creative or aesthetic abilities, or choice of subject matter) didn't make "size for the sake of size" seem as obvious. Or in order to check off today's box of hip and cool, huge canvases are now almost de rigueur.
Contemporary art museums like the Broad, MOCA or Hammer are an essential part of the local art scene, but they need to be balanced by other styles, other periods of art.
To paraphrase, "All Murakami-Basquiat-Koons and no Giotto-Raphael-Van-Gogh-Sargeant-Homer makes Jack a dull boy," (Or LA a dull city).
If this doesn't change much even after the Geffen Galleries open and, less so, the Lucas Museum too (ie, okay, it's admittedly getting very close to pre-Raphaelite-Thomas-Kinkade territory), we got a problem.