Tastes of Paradise

The Smoking Lamp is an object that amplifies the personal choice of smoking or not smoking in a public environment. The lamp is deliberately paradoxical, at once inviting the public to smoke whilst at the same time signalling their transgression. Designed as a funnel that terminates with a ring of light, the lamp changes from a bright white to a warm pink if it detects nicotine smoke beneath it. The light emitted corresponds with the new situation, illuminating the particles being exhaled by the smoker, and placing the smoker within a theatrical scene. The light situation calls to mind the dramatic interrogation rooms from celluloid history, spotlighting the smoker, exposing them and their activity. The red hand and face gestures of the smokers become the focus of attention while the non smoking public, cast as the spectator, watches the extraordinary phenomenon that was first described by 17th century Europeans - before the word was verbalised - as “drinking smoke”.

Official prohibition of smoking in public spaces has a history as long as tobacco usage itself. The most recent case in Europe was under the Nazi regime in Germany campaigned against smoking with slogans such as ‘Die Deutsche Frau raucht nicht’ (The German woman does not smoke), cigarettes were rationed and banned from all public places as part of a wider programme to attain a more ‘organic’,‘natural’ and ‘biological’ way of life. Restricting individual freedom was justified for the greater good of society: to ensure the future of the German genotype (1). As a consequence of such prohibitive measures, smoking has been repeatedly used a symbolic protest against political oppression and to express liberation: In revolutionary Prussia, every smoker seen on the street was suspected of being a “dangerous democrat”(2) whilst in nineteenth century France, smoking acquired new symbolic significance for the female emancipation movement, when rebels like George Sand and Lola Montez shocked the social mores of their time by smoking deliberately in public. Gender bias in smoking lingers on today in the adoption of cigars, the ultimate symbol of power and masculinity. The cigar was famously used as a substitute phallus in the Clinton–Lewinsky affair and Marcel Duchamp anticipates such a situation in his 1967 poster design for "Ready-Mades et Editions de et sur Duchamp" (3) where a photomontage shows a male hand holding a cigar below a rising cloud of smoke in the form of female genitalia. Duchamp’s image was the departure point for the invitation to INTOXICATION (4) at the Galerie Vanessa Quang in 2006. But this time the gender relations were inversed; a woman's hand holds a cigarette that is superimposed with an industrial smoke emission. Today, as intolerance of smoking in public increases, the smoking lamp is designed for tobacco’s new ambiguous status: at a moment when smoking is not quite yet a sign of social rebellion but the space for a few puffs are (or are about to be) greatly reduced. If the cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch observed that “smoking creates both a feeling of activity in leisure and one of leisure in the midst of activity”, then the Smoking Lamp serves as a device to augment smoking activity to the point of absurdity. Neither for, nor against, the lamp simply magnifies the language and culture of smoking, amplifying the personal choice that each individual makes.

The smoking Lamp is part of a larger artistic research into the question is how to generate real-time consciousness of air pollution. The effects of contemporary pollution are slow and imperceptible: a single cigarette will not kill, but a continuous use might - we consume now and we pay later. Like all the projects from Pollstream series (see hehe.org/pollstream), it reduces the time delay between our actions and their effects, cause and effect are scaled into the real-time decision making process, posing the question: to pollute or not to pollute? Smoking Lamp brings alive the ugly stuff that goes into our lungs - the cigarette smoke itself. And as vapour particles are translated into red light and noisy oscillations one becomes aware of those little clouds we inhale and exhale. As a design, a product, an installation, a work of art, it does neither offer humiliation nor affirmation for the smoker - it turns the beast into the beauty and amplifies our choice - here and now.

Obama signs Recovery and Reinvestment Act with reinstated support for the arts

Bailout benefits NEA and Smithsonian

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Smithsonian Institution have secured a small allotment of federal funding as part of the $787bn American Recovery and Reinvestment Act signed by President Obama on 17 February, following fears that arts groups would be completely excluded from the stimulus package. A committee comprising members of both houses of Congress reached an agreement on the final spending bill, which was notably smaller than the versions passed by either the House or the Senate, with a number of cuts made to education and health programmes to secure the sliver of Republican support needed (three votes) to pass the bill. The NEA will receive $50m to distribute to non-profit arts organisations while the Smithsonian gets $25m to repair its facilities.

Although the original bill, which was passed by the House of Representatives, contained $50m for the National Endowment of the Arts, the version that went through the Senate had completely removed such funding. It also included an amendment by Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn that would prevent museums, theatres and art centres from receiving any stimulus money by grouping them with other projects considered “wasteful and non-stimulative” such as casinos and highway beautification. Senator Coburn’s amendment was passed by the Senate and is still in the final bill, but the mention of museums, theatres and art centres was removed and now only excludes “any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, or swimming pool”.

When the House voted on the final bill, Democratic Congressman David Obey, who sponsored the bill, explained why he thought it was important to retain NEA funding in the stimulus package: “There are five million people who work in the arts industry. And right now they have 12.5% unemployment—or are you suggesting that somehow if you work in that field, it isn’t real when you lose your job, your mortgage or your health insurance? We’re trying to treat people who work in the arts the same way as anybody else.” 

Following the House’s passing of the final bill, the NEA released a statement describing its plans for the stimulus money. According to this, the agency “will make awards that result in job retention… For example, by awarding grants to arts education programmes, the NEA can help grantees employ teaching artists and administrators. Through grants to art festivals, the NEA can help the festival employ staff to manage the event and artists to perform or exhibit there. By funding new productions, the NEA can help an arts organisation provide work for carpenters, electricians, caterers, ushers, custodians, lighting designers, seamstresses, parking attendants and others as well as artists.” 

Meanwhile, the Smithsonian’s funding was cut down from $150m in the House’s original version of the bill to $25m in the final package. A spokeswoman for the Institution said: “We’re delighted that the museum has received this funding. The Smithsonian certainly has infrastructural needs that we have every year and this will help in addressing those. We have a list of projects that need funding and we’re going to figure out which ones need the most urgent attention. We’re also going to look at which will help to create new jobs as that is the point of the whole stimulus package.”

Some of the most vocal critics of the arts receiving stimulus funds came from senior Republicans such as Arizona Senator John McCain, who singled out funds allotted to the NEA and the Smithsonian Institution as among the “hundreds of millions of dollars in unnecessary spending that will not do anything to stimulate the economy”. He went on to ask “how giving tens of millions of dollars to the National Endowment of the Arts or the Smithsonian Museum will reverse the devastating effects of the economic crisis?” 

In response to the threat to arts funding, advocacy groups such as Americans for the Arts and the American Association of Museums lobbied senators to oppose the bill, citing the economic benefits of supporting cultural organisations.


Jeff Koons’s $25 million sculpture for Lacma

Jeff Koons is working on the largest and most ambitious project of his career: a towering sculpture consisting of a life-size motorised replica of a locomotive dangling from a crane. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) is funding the awesome work that will rise above the entrance plaza like a memorial to the Industrial Age technology that fuelled America’s westward expansion. The project, in development for two years, is about to move into the fabrication stage. The price tag? “We’re talking about a $25m work,” said the artist, speaking to The Art Newspaper at The National Arts Club in New York, which recently awarded him the organisation’s Gold Medal of Honour. “That’s a number we used going into the project,” confirms Lacma director Michael Govan in a telephone interview, adding that he will not begin raising the money until fabrication costs are calculated. The projected cost would make Train the most expensive artwork ever commissioned by a museum, surpassing Richard Serra’s $20m sculptural array, The matter of time, 2005, in the Guggenheim Bilbao.

Lacma has already spent about $1.75m of $2m pledged by trustee Wallis Annenberg for preliminary studies. “It’s chugging along,” Mr Govan quips of the complex and demanding process of realisation, which must adhere to Koons’s exacting production standards. 

The artist envisions hanging a full-scale 70-foot-long steel-and-aluminium replica of a 1943 Baldwin 2900 steam locomotive from a 160-foot-tall Liebherr LR 1750 lattice-boom crane. The train’s wheels will spin, its funnel belch smoke and the whistle blow at appointed times. “A real train was not meant to hang vertically and would have all sorts of environmental problems,” explains Mr Govan, adding that preliminary design and engineering studies were completed by Los Angeles-based fabricator Carlson & Co. “The next stage is 3D scanning of the parts to get the data necessary to recreate the train,” he says. Scanning began late last month at the New Mexico Steam Locomotive and Railroad Historical Society—the Albuquerque museum that owns the original train serving as the model. “No manufacture can analyse it until we have all the data,” he says, adding that the scanning will be finished in May. “We have to get a crane,” he continues. “They were tough to come by in the old economy—you used to have to get on a waiting list—but it’s getting easier,” he notes. “It’s really architecture, like building a campanile or bell tower,” he says, “and that’s almost exactly how it functions in the urban environment. It’s the architecture around which the museum campus will function, and the campus is a town square for LA.” When will the landmark be completed? A date will not be set until manufacturer begins, but Mr Govan says he and the artist anticipate it will take about four years. 

Lacma has another daunting commission on the more immediate horizon: a sculpture by land artist Michael Heizer that incorporates a granite boulder weighing hundreds of tonnes. The 22-foot-high pyramidal rock will rest on reinforced concrete rails above a ramp that cuts into the ground to allow visitors to walk ominously beneath. Levitated/slot mass will be installed at the north edge of the campus near the parking garage entrance at 6th Street, says Mr Govan, adding that the cost of the work will be determined in coming months, and prospective sponsors have expressed interest. He would like to unveil it in a year, but a truck must be specially designed to transport the colossus from a quarry in Riverside, California, about 70 miles away. “Its arrival in LA will be quite a ceremony,” says Mr Govan. He wants Lacma’s new large-scale sculptures to “define the architectonics of the campus. They hover between sculpture and architecture and become the focal points”, he says, “so the defining experience outside is not of giant buildings but of artworks.”

THE JOKER

Richard Prince at the Guggenheim.

The immense art-world success of Richard Prince, the subject of a large and seductive retrospective at the Guggenheim, depresses me, not that I can gainsay it. If “quintessential artist in a generation” were a job opening, Prince, fifty-eight years old, would be an inevitable hire, having hit no end of avant-gardist sweet spots since the late nineteen-seventies in photography, painting, and sculpture. His contemporaries Cindy Sherman and, off and on, Jeff Koons are better, for stand-alone works of originality, beauty, and significance. But they don’t contest Prince’s chosen, Warholian ground as a magus of contemporary American culture. (Koons tried, but his attempt was too weird for comprehension, let alone assent.) Prince’s works make him an artist as anthropologist, illuminating folkways by recycling advertising photographs, cartoon and one-liner jokes, soft-core pornography, motorcycle-cult ephemera, pulp-novel covers, “Dukes of Hazzard”-era car parts, celebrity memorabilia, and other demotic flotsam. His bald rip-offs of painting styles from Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, and, lately, Willem de Kooning make him an artist as irreverent art critic, razzing exalted reputations. Prince can seem to cover, in an insouciantly corrosive way, the whole topography of the aesthetic in present high and low life; and he is acute enough that a refusal to play along, for the nuanced pleasures that he provides, would be bigoted. But his is a shallow, brittle, ultimately desolating conceit—seizing on things that are a-twitch with a little vitality, and chloroforming them. Prince’s nearest approach to identifiable emotion is the exiguous zeal of obsessive collecting. (He’s a bibliophile, with letches for authors, including Nabokov and Kerouac.)

Prince was born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1949, and grew up in a suburb of Boston. He has said that his parents were spies for the Office of Strategic Services, and that his father served in Vietnam. Caution is in order, however, regarding Prince’s autobiographical accounts. In 1985, an art magazine, ZG, published an interview with him, conducted in 1967 by J. G. Ballard, the English writer of dire fantasy, when Prince was eighteen years old and under detention in London for want of a valid passport. The interview, in which Prince describes his father as a diabolical manipulator of minds, was a lively hoax. Also in the eighties, Prince collaborated with the late Colin de Land, an eccentric dealer, to make the work and shepherd the career of one John Dogg, a fashionable and, it later turned out, nonexistent sculptor. Prince’s devotion to the put-on is among his bona fides in a generation—that of punk, deconstruction, and David Letterman—addicted to vertiginous irony: in-jokes with nothing in them. An appropriate bonus of the catalogue is a series of interviews about Prince, by the hipster’s hipster Glenn O’Brien, with leading technicians of waggery: ad and magazine people, cartoon editors (including Robert Mankoff, of The New Yorker), a car designer, the Hells Angel Sonny Barger, John Waters, and Phyllis Diller.

Prince attended college in Maine and arrived in New York in 1973, where for ten years he worked various low-end jobs (notably, assembling magazine tear sheets) in the Time & Life Building. He started to show in 1975—small, gnomic paintings, prints, and photo-and-text works. His emergence on the scene is commonly, and lazily, associated with “Pictures,” an epochal 1977 show at the non-profit downtown gallery Artists Space. He happened not to be in it. (Neither was Cindy Sherman, the first artist who comes to mind in the same connection.) Curated by the critical theorist Douglas Crimp, “Pictures” announced a movement of menacingly cold-eyed appropriation, as in the work of Sherrie Levine, who became known for her no-comment photographs of classic modern photographs. Prince had taken to photographing magazine ads, enjoying the strangeness of, in his words, a “reality that has the chances of looking real, but a reality that doesn’t have any chances of being real.” He refused an invitation to appear in “Pictures,” he has said, because he was put off by what he deemed to be Crimp’s dogmatism. (Crimp has denied inviting Prince.) An admirably bristly independence is apparent in his move, eleven years ago, from Manhattan to rural Rensselaerville, New York. There he filled a tacky house with some of his works and collections of this and that to such striking effect that, in 2005, the Guggenheim bought it as an in-situ work of art, titled “Second House.” (In June of this year, lightning set it afire; what to do with the intact but charred remnant is undecided.) Flirting with self-forgetful realism in the nineties, Prince took elegiac photographs of woebegone back-road sights, such as a basketball hoop in an overgrown meadow. That mood passed.

Prince has dubbed his retrospective “Spiritual America,” keying it to his 1983 photograph of an infamous Garry Gross photograph, published by Playboy Books, in 1976, of a naked Brooke Shields, aged ten, her prepubescent body oiled and her face given womanly makeup. Prince applied the title—which comes from Alfred Stieglitz, who coined it for his 1923 photograph of a gelded workhorse’s rear end—to the work, to a show consisting of nothing else, and to the one-off gallery, in a Lower East Side storefront, that first hosted it. His unbounded enthusiasm for the awful image offers queasy-making testimony to his character as an artist. He sees in the photograph, he has said, “a body with two different sexes, maybe more, and a head that looks like it’s got a different birthday.” And he enjoyed the spectacle of Shields’s failed later effort, in a lawsuit, to quash Gross’s picture, which her mother had authorized for four hundred and fifty dollars. It gave him a “patriotic” feeling, he has declared—“that is to say if I was to have heard that this type of activity over a photograph was happening in another country I would have considered moving there.” (Note the piled-up subjunctives: Princean grammar.) The Guggenheim’s chief curator, Nancy Spector—who, working closely with the artist, has installed the show with excellent rhythm and clarity—hastens, in an essay in the catalogue, to defend the work as social criticism, “a portrait of desperation” exposing the American pursuit of fame at any cost. But she thereby fails to credit (if that’s the word) Prince’s omnivorous connoisseurship of kink, as in paintings (which have been selling for millions at auction) from covers of semi-smutty romance novels featuring nurses. He doesn’t diagnose decadence. He swims in it.

by Peter Schjeldahl

Artist: Richard Prince

In the early eighties, Richard Prince started to re-photograph magazine ads featuring the Marlboro Man; since then, he’s given biker chicks, Borscht Belt jokes, celebrity autographs, and pulp-fiction nurses the legitimizing stamp of “appropriation art.” Karen Rosenberg spoke to the 55-year-old artist and obsessive book collector.

You started working with ads when you worked at Time-Life?


I was in the tear-sheets department. At the end of the day, all I was left with was the advertising images, and it became my subject. Pens, watches, models—it wasn’t your typical subject matter for art. Then, in 1980, I started taking pictures of the cowboys. You don’t see them out in public anymore—you can’t ride down a highway and see them on a billboard. But at Time-Life, I was working with seven or eight magazines, and Marlboro had ads in almost all of them. Every week, I’d see one and be like, “Oh, that’s mine. Thank you.” It’s sort of like beach combing.

Is there a current-day equivalent to the Marlboro Man?


I would have to say probably certain designers—Ralph Lauren, who shows up week after week in the same section of the Times Magazine. Abercrombie & Fitch—their catalogues have an art look. I could actually see Man Ray or George Platt Lynes or Robert Mapplethorpe photographing them. I kind of like Marc Jacobs’s campaign; it almost doesn’t look like advertising. Actually, I’ve started to look at a new cigarette ad, for Camel. It’s an illustration of a woman, and the mouth is the focus. I think back to what de Kooning would have thought of it; he used to cut out the “T” smiles from the Camels and paste them on his women.

What got you from there to painting?


I found the subject matter, which was the jokes. Before that, I wanted to paint but I didn’t know what to paint. The subject comes first, the medium second. In this show, there are some new paintings done on canceled checks. I collect other people’s canceled checks—celebrity checks. I remember buying a canceled Jack Kerouac check once.

What do you think of younger artists under your influence, people like Kelley Walker and Wade Guyton?


It would be strange for me to think I’m being ripped off, because that’s what I do! In those days, it was called “pirating.” Now they call it “sampling.” There’s a guy on the street who paints copies of my “Nurse” paintings, along with Elizabeth Peytons and Eric Fischls. I think it’s funny. I actually bought one; I thought it was pretty close.

What’s the difference between Richard Prince the artist and Richard Prince the collector?


I don’t see any difference now between what I collect and what I make. It’s become the same. What I’m collecting will, a lot of times, end up in my work. There’s an Elizabeth Peyton piece in the show, one of her canceled checks with a Sid Vicious drawing. And a Sonic Youth check with a signed drumhead.

How about your own collectors—do you agree with their taste in your work?


I’m surprised at the reaction to the “Nurse” paintings. I’ve never felt that I had to put out work that I actually liked—just because it’s out there doesn’t mean that I have to stand behind it. A lot of it’s experimental, spontaneous. It’s about knocking about in the studio and bumping into things.

The joke paintings are especially popular—one sold last year for more than $700,000.
When they first came out, you couldn’t give them away. They’ve become pretty serious to people, which is funny. During an auction last year, behind the podium, they had a monochromatic joke painting next to a Rothko next to a Barnett Newman. They’re just paint, stretchers, and canvas; it’s the subject that’s radical.

By - Karen Rosenberg

“Modernists are pushing Russia into infernal darkness”

Alexey Beliayev-Guintovt, the 2008 winner of Russia’s Kandinsky Prize, on the struggle for the future of Russian art.

On 8 December, Beliayev-Guintovt was known only to the small community of people who closely follow the Russian contemporary art scene. But overnight he became one of the most talked-about Russian artists in the past two decades. “Before the prize, my website had only a few hundred hits a day,” he says. “Now it has several thousand a day.”

The Art Newspaper is the first publication invited to visit his modest three-room apartment/art studio, in a working-class neighbourhood in his native city, Moscow. The walls of one room are decorated with a 19th-century print featuring Napoleon at Waterloo in 1814, and a Soviet banner emblazoned with the words “Workers of the World Unite”. There is a bust of Lenin on the shelf. The furniture is late 19th century, except for an ornate chair that Beliayev-Guintovt says is probably 18th-century Persian. “I call it my Eurasian throne,” he says.

The television is playing a 1937 Soviet propaganda film showing Stalin inspecting a parade of robust athletes on Red Square. “This was basically a parade of Eurasian athletes; just look at the faces,” he says. The screen shows the youthful features of Slavs, Central Asians and people from the Caucasus region. “My next project will be based on this parade,” he adds. “I want to do a Eurasian parade of the future, depicted in about 15 large paintings. I want to give a futuristic view to the Soviet-Stalinist aesthetic.”

Beliayev-Guintovt doesn't hide his fondness for the Stalinist-era aesthetic, and he is uncomfortable when it comes to passing judgment on the Soviet dictator. “I had family members on both sides during the Stalin era. Some worked for the NKVD (secret police), while others ended up in the Gulag.”

“My style unites space and time, and Eurasian ideals are very prominent,” he says. “Art in Russia has always had a very strong social component. I am at the epicentre of a conservative revolutionary movement that includes many nationalities, from Islamic mystics to Russian Orthodox old believers.”

Beliayev-Guintovt says that contemporary art in Russia, as it ascribes to current international art trends, is run by a “totalitarian sect” and that “modernists are pushing Russia into infernal darkness”.

“The controversy over my art is a classic battle between icon painters and iconoclasts,” he says. “They want to destroy the sacredness of images, and I want to exalt it. This is a very serious struggle over the future of Russian art, and with me getting the Kandinsky Prize, they’ve lost a major battle.”

During Perestroika in the late 1980s, Beliayev-Guintovt, born in 1965, dabbled in a variety of western youth counter-cultures. “I was a hippie, a punk, a new waver,” he says. He began his artistic career in 1985, but his big break came in 1994 when gallerist and artist Alexander Yakut took him under his wing.

His painting technique involves covering the canvas with gold leaf and creating an image with a stencil. He then dabs his palms in paint and presses them onto the canvas, his hands working as his brush. “I don't sign my work because my handprint can’t be faked,” he says. “My images might look traditional, but the texture and technique is certainly contemporary. My method combines the traditions of icon painting with the technology of Soviet avant-garde poster-making.”

Today, promoting his Eurasian ideas is Beliayev-Guintovt’s paramount concern. In essence, these ideas call for Russia to turn away from the west and towards the east, and strive for a rebirth of the Russian empire in its tsarist-era borders. Regarding art, he supports “the righteousness of classicism” and “the power of beauty”. Yet he admits his art manifestos are also intended to poke fun at and provoke his detractors on the artistic Left. This of course leaves one wondering whether all his talk about ideology is serious or just an artistic ruse.

John Varoli | 28.1.09 |

The Two Faces of Takashi Murakami

He's high art. He's low culture. He's a one-man mass-market machine.

Takashi Murakami is often billed as the next Andy Warhol. Like the American pop art icon, he fuses high and low, pulling imagery from consumer culture to produce visually arresting, highly original work. He is vigorously, ingeniously self-promotional. In the past few years, Murakami has swept across the US and Europe, receiving fawning media attention and exhibiting at big-name museums. Just shy of 42, the charismatic artist even lives and works in what he calls a factory. How much more Warhol can you get?

But there's a key difference. Warhol took from the low and gave to the high. With ironic detachment, his work - paintings few could afford, films few could understand - appealed to an audience in on the joke. Murakami, on the other hand, takes from the low and gives to the high, the low, and everything in between. 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. Murakami's work hits all price points: This fall he plans on selling plastic figurines packaged with bubble gum - a Murakami for $3. Warhol died before a T-shirt company licensed his soup cans and made a bundle. Murakami, who reads Bill Gates for management tips, knows better than to make that mistake.

It may be old hat to draw ideas and imagery from the mass market, but it's something else to hawk your wares in the candy aisle. In this as in other things, Japan may be leading us into the future. Murakami, who grew up in Tokyo, sees his heritage as key to his art: "The Japanese don't really have a difference or hierarchy between high and low." His "art merchandise" is dominated by a cast of creepily cute characters inspired by manga comics and anime cartoons - the twin pillars of Japanese pop culture. Cartoon characters have figured in high art since Roy Lichtenstein first transferred a Sunday comic to canvas in the early '60s. But the art establishment - steeped in old-world prejudices against mass merchandising - took Lichtenstein and Warhol's art as a critique. Murakami's work celebrates commerce, and commerce returns the favor: His Vuitton handbags have become one of the French fashion house's best-selling lines. Speaking through an interpreter, Murakami explains that his art process is "more about creating goods and selling them than about exhibitions." Not that he's shunning the big shows. In September, a 23-foot sculpture of one of his trademark characters - Mr. Pointy, a cross between a blissed-out Buddha and a space alien - went up in New York City's Rockefeller Center.

Murakami began his art career as a traditionalist. During his twenties at Tokyo National University, he worked on a doctorate in Nihonga, an amalgam of Western and Eastern painting styles dating to the late 19th century. But after witnessing the rise of anime and manga in Japanese culture during the '80s, he grew disillusioned with Nihonga, finding it irrelevant to daily Japanese life. He wanted to create something that would leave a lasting impression. "I set out to investigate the secret of market survivability - the universality of characters such as Mickey Mouse, Sonic the Hedgehog, Doraemon, Miffy, Hello Kitty, and their knock-offs, produced in Hong Kong," Murakami wrote for a 2001 retrospective of his work. The result, in 1993, was Mr. DOB, Murakami's most ubiquitous and enduring character.

Now, as president of Kaikai Kiki, Murakami presides over an art-making corporation that operates from a campus of buildings known as the Hiropon Factory, outside Tokyo, as well as a studio in Brooklyn. While Warhol's Factory featured such colorful characters as Candy Darling, Lou Reed, and Edie Sedgwick, Hiropon is peopled by accountants, publicists, managers, and a computerized administrative system. "Staff members type up reports of what they work on each day. We then send everyone an email that compiles all the reports," explains Yuko Sakata, Kaikai Kiki's New York exhibition coordinator. Murakami, she says, got the idea for daily logs after reading Gates' Speed of Thought.

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.

Each creation begins as a sketch in one of numerous pocket-sized notebooks. Full-size drawings are then scanned into the computer. From there, Murakami "paints" his works in Adobe Illustrator, tweaking the composition and cycling through thousands of colors until at last he hands the finished versions off to his assistants. His staff then prints out the work on paper, silk-screens the outline onto canvas, and commences painting. Without this embrace of technology, Murakami says, "I could have never produced this many works this efficiently, and the work wouldn't be as intense."

The fusion of art and computing led Murakami to a pictorial style that rejects the illusion of depth and perspective. Dubbed superflat, the approach isn't entirely new - Warhol's paintings often read flat - but Murakami has something else in mind. Superflat captures the aesthetics of our technological age: PDAs, digital billboards, flat-screen TVs. An exhibition curated by Murakami, titled simply Superflat, made its way to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2001. "I'm amazed at how that show continues to reverberate," says Michael Darling, an assistant curator at LA MoCA who helped bring the show to the States. "Superflat also refers to the leveling of distinctions between high and low. Murakami likes to flaunt that he can make a million-dollar sculpture and then take the same subject and crank out a bunch of tchotchkes."

The danger is that Murakami's unapologetic hucksterism may obscure just how good his art is. His images are disturbing and beautiful, and, above all, full of ideas. This alone won't secure his place in art history. What should is the way he marries talent to a keen understanding and manipulation of market forces. And unlike Warhol, when college kids plaster Mr. DOB on their dorm walls, he gets paid.

Jeff Howe (jeffhowe@wiredmag.com) is a contributing editor at Wired.