Gig-normous article in this week's Sunday NYTimes Magazine about the Japanese artist Murakami. Maybe a bit long at 9 pages but lots of interesting stuff. At least, I thought so. Could all be a complete load of blathering bullshit, I suppose. But any article that's got a 500 kilo fiberglass elephant, an art gallery on the 12th floor of a dept store, outraged otaku, obscene kawaii notebooks in a cake shop, Marc Jacobs, and 14th century gay manga... hell, that's a pretty okay read.
I'm not sure why but I've always enjoyed Murakami's stuff. Other artists who only conceptualize their work and leave the, y'know, messy inconvenient part of actually creating to staffs and factories tend to bug the crap outta me. I'm thinking of guys like Jeff Koons, Mark Kostabi, Damien Hirst. All of whom I generally loathe to some degree. It's perhaps the choice of source material (otaku v. kitsch v. graffiti v. whatever-the-hell-it-is-Hirst-is-thinking-about).