미술과 디자인의 통합: 무라카미 다카시의 미술 상품과 욕망

Abstract

Material culture examines artifacts to interpret the meanings and features of a specific time and place. Hands-on historians, such as archaeologists, delineate that these patterns of material assemblages are indicative of the wider behavior of a particular society. Material culture has been widely applied to other academic disciplines as a theoretic frame for the relationship between products and society. Western art history, however, has loosely applied this perspective with questions regarding the compatibility between art and objecthood. Although art, exempted from exchange value, has recently turned to a world of commodity. Well-known "artists" are now working as designers of everyday goods. This trend reflects the emergence of art and design actively blended under the power of the culture industry. At the forefront of this movement is Murakami Takashi. Murakami, one of the leading pop artists working in the United States and Japan, is having both his fine art and commercial media outputs reevaluated. His 1998 work <My Lonesome Cowboy> achieved remarkable sales at $ 15.2 million in 2008, and his $ 5000 Louis Vuitton bag increased the sales record. Murakami owned Kaikai Kiki Company, in New York and Tokyo. The company organized non-material art fairs and produced commercial artifacts. Murakami attempts to blur the boundaries between high and low-art. He appropriates popular themes from mass media and pop culture and turns them into thirty-foot sculptures and "Superflat" paintings. These paintings become marketable commercial goods. Superflat, the style that Murakami is credited with starting, is characterized by flat planes of color and graphic images. The pieces comment on otaku lifestyle and subculture, consumerism and sexual fetishism. Like Andy Warhol, Murakami takes low-culture, repackages it, and sells it to the highest bidder in the “high-art” market. Unlike Warhol, Murakami also makes his repacked, low-culture available to other markets in the form of prints, sculptures, videos, T-shirts, key chains, mouse pads, plush dolls, cell phone caddies, etc.. Murakami's work is not just in one place but in many ranging from toy stores, candy aisles, comic book stores, as well as French design powerhouse Louis Vuitton stores. The variety of Murakami’s works is partially related to the nature of desire. According to Deleuze and Guattari, our will to power is named ‘a desire’. This idea is characterized as the incessant want for something different. This "want" changes- synthesizing into the foreign. Deleuze called it 'schizophrenic.' The prevailing desire precedes the need and leads to consumption, affecting the production. Based upon the analysis of desire, this paper attempts to explain today's conflation between art and design.