Takashi Murakami is often touted as the next Andy Warhol. Like the American pop art icon, he fuses high and low art, utilizing imagery from consumer culture to produce truly unique work. Often referred to as ©Murakami, he has recently exploded across the US and Europe scene, receiving fawning media attention and exhibiting at big-name museums. He makes paintings, sculptures, videos, T-shirts, key chains, mousepads, plush dolls, cell phone caddies, and, last but not least, $5,000 limited-edition Louis Vuitton handbags. Warhol died before a T-shirt company licensed his soup cans and made a bundle. Murakami, who reads Bill Gates for business tips, knows better than to make that mistake.
Murakami owes much of his success to the highly efficient Hiropon Factory. Hardly a reclusive artist toiling in his garret studio, he employs 25 assistants to perform specialized tasks, and he uses technology in pragmatic, labor-saving ways. Because his work features a number of recurring motifs – eyeballs, mushrooms, flowers – the factory maintains an immense electronic archive of renderings that he can cut and paste into the files he’s working on. Murakami may be the first artist to make paintings from his own portfolio of digital clip art. All things considered, on one hand he is revolutionizing contemporary art, but otherwise he is also diminishing the specialty of his craft.