After enduring a canceled flight, an entire JFK airport ground stop, and our longest flight delay ever (seven hours in an airport terminal), we are home and I don’t know how Oscar managed to get himself to work. Last I checked, we got home at six o’clock this morning.
Not here to dwell though.
We flew into NY on Friday morning, checked our bags at our posh little place on W56th and 7th Ave. (down the block from Carnegie Hall; we can thank my parents for the hook up here), and headed to the Brooklyn Museum for the © MURAKAMI exhibit. There’s Oscar saying hello to a gargantuan Tongari-Kun, aka Mr. Pointy:
So this exhibit is dense and totally crazy, and it was helpful to have first walked through the Utagawa: Masters of the Japanese Print, 1770–1900 exhibit so we could get some perspective on Murakami’s influences and concerns with composition and theme, which we see in the Superflat of his pop art, and because Hokusai is not a part of the School of Utagawa, think instead of Hiroshige’s waves resonating in Murakami’s fields of flowers with faces, his spirals of flowering vines, his Milk (pink canvas accompanying Hiropon), Cream (blue canvas accompanying My Lonesome Cowboy). Think of their compositions and studies of perspective when thinking of Superflat, and also think of their explicit erotic art. Ultimately what it appears Murakami aims to do, while drawing upon those classical influences, is to not merely blur but eradicate the line between high art, pop art, pornographic art, and also commercial art to the point of hardcore commercialism.