Art Basel in Hong Kong brought a lot of artists to the city, including Takashi Murakami who is looking forward to a retrospective of his work in Moscow this Fall. He spoke to Enid Tsui about his reputation:Continue Reading
One of Amy Cappellazzo’s early successes in the auction business was when she sold in May of 2003 an edition of Takashi Murakami’s Miss Ko2 for the then un-heard-of price of $567,500. Seven years later, another example of the work was sold by Philippe Ségalot at his Carte Blanche sale at Phillips for a whopping $6.8m, a nearly 12-fold increase in price.
On April 2, Sotheby’s will bring another example from the edition of 3 to market in Hong Kong with an estimate of HK$15-20m ($1.9-2.6m.) The work achieved Murakami’s second highest price when it sold at Phillips. The estimate may be an indication of a re-calibrated Murakami market. But it might also be a red flag to collectors for one of the artist’s most recognizable and exhibited pieces.
Maurice and Paul began collecting art around 1990. They started with Impressionist pieces but soon moved to the contemporary art market and sold the older works.
“If we had collected only Impressionists, today we would have only a few pieces, instead of hundreds of pieces,” Maurice Marciano said.
[…] Paul Schimmel, the vice president of the Hauser & Wirth gallery here and the former chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, said Maurice Marciano’s interest in art was revived when he toured a Takashi Murakami show at the museum in 2008.Continue Reading
Linda Yablonsky got trapped in Tokyo when Takashi Murakami’s Geisai #15 was cancelled due to the tsunami. Putting her time to good use, she spent some time with Murakami and discovered that along with the large staff of painters, his work is all about the artists:
In one of the two exhibition spaces, works from his private collection by Mark Grotjahn, Yoshitomo Nara, and Grayson Perry were on show with three new nudes-on-silver by Murakami—his Three Graces, as it were—that will head to London at the end of May for a show at Gagosian. (Murakami has caught the collecting bug pretty badly, especially for Nara.) […] Based on paintings by the nineteenth-century artist Kuroda Seiki, one of the first Japanese to incorporate Western imagery in his work, the new Murakami works represent something of a departure from his Mr. Pointys, mushroom-cloud skulls, and flowering smiley faces. There were also a couple of modest, impressionistic paintings of a big-eyed young girl by OB, a shy nineteen-year-old from Kyoto who was in the gallery to meet us. She is one of fifteen young artists currently resident in a mentoring program that Murakami, an industry unto himself, has established in his suburban factory.
On a tatami-matted platform in the other room, three of his flowerball sculptures, in three different sizes, were paired with three figures of cute adolescent girls by Chiho Aoshima, one of the seven artists whose careers the Kaikai Kiki organization manages. […] I asked about a sixteen-foot-tall Mr. Pointy canvas taking shape in the studio. Barnett Newman’s “zips” inspired it, he said, naming Donald Judd, Julian Opie, and Brice Marden’s monochromes as other sources, and On Kawara, Tatsuo Miyajima, and Yasumasa Morimura as the artists who paved the way for Murakami to be “super famous.”
Black Book reports that Takashi Murakami’s company won’t press charges in the case of the ring found in a pawn shop years after it
Kaikai Kiki has elected not to press charges, despite the due diligence of pawn shop ownerAngel Parets and Miami Beach Police Department Detective Pete Rodriguez, who had a suspect in custody within 48 hours of the ring’s discovery. One would’ve thunk that Kaikai Kiki would be only to eager to prosecute; teach those crooks a hard lesson.
Last month, a one-of-a-kind Doruko (“skull”) ring created by the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami was serendipitously recovered from Costa de Oro, a South Beach pawn shop just steps away from the Miami Beach Police Department’s Washington Avenue headquarters. The platinum and diamond artwork, which features Murakami’s iconic smiling daisies, had reportedly been stolen from the Delano Hotel’s Florida Room back in December 2008, after the conclusion of the Art Basel satellite fair, Design Miami.
It’s Thanksgiving in America and that still means paying attention to Macy’s parade in New York City. The New York Times’s Dave Itzikoff explains that the annual spectacle has increasingly taken on a high-art tone with balloons made from images created by artists like Keith Haring, Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami:
For the organizers of the Macy’s parade the addition of Mr. Murakami and his characters to its lineup is the fulfillment of a longtime goal and several years of work.
Robin Hall, the executive producer of the parade, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Murakami was one of a handful of artists Macy’s sought out when it started its series of balloons designed by internationally recognized artists in 2005.
The parade, Mr. Hall said, “is a snapshot of American culture.” While much of its roster is dedicated to readily identifiable figures like SpongeBob SquarePants and Dora the Explorer, he said, “I do believe there’s room in this parade — and have always believed this — for high art.”Continue Reading
The Murakami show was produced with the help and financial support of Perrotin, the Parisian gallery owner who seems to be subtly curating the Chateau’s program with his roster of marketable artists. Indeed, referring to Murakami, Xavier Veilhan (the prior show at Versailles), and Maurizio Cattelan (at one point thought to be next), dealer Eva Presenhuber commented that, “Perrotin has all the most powerful artists of the moment.” But it seems the nation’s Ministry of Culture is putting pressure on the museum to alternate between a French artist and a foreign one, and rumor has it that next year the star will be Bernard Venet. “If that happens, it will really be a step down, and that would be very damaging to this international program,” whispered those standing around Perrotin. Curator Laurent Le Bon, who is organizing every contemporary art show at Versailles, in his politically correct French style, assured me that he did not know the name of the next artist and that only palace president Jean-Jacques Aillagon was au courant.
