I’ve been thinking a lot about Takashi Murakami and his work lately. There’s something about his work and his approach to art and commerce that I find really intriguing. The fact that he can ride the line between high end art and mass produced goods is also amazing as few artists can achieve such success.
MURAKAMI: It’s true that I pick up many ideas from different Japanese things. The way I formed my studio and how I organize things actually came out of the model of the Japanese animation studio and the manga industry. The manga industry is gigantic in Japan. There are so many layers to the business, like making a video, making a spin-off game, cards . . .
GINGERAS: And figurines and printed matter . . .
MURAKAMI: Yes, everything. It’s kind of like creating something like the Star Wars franchise. A single big hit for a manga studio means tons of money. One can gross more than a movie. The Japanese invented this industry. I’ve been immersed in manga since I was a kid. I grew up with this culture. So I started to think about how to compare manga to contemporary art. The contemporary art industry did not yet exist in Japan when I was starting out. Contemporary art and manga—what is the same about them? Nothing, right? The manga industry has a lot of talented people, but contemporary art works on more of a solitary model. No one embarks on collaboration in contemporary art in order to make money. But in the manga world, everyone is invested in collaboration. The most important point is that the manga industry constantly encourages new creations and creators.
GINGERAS: Like passing the creative baton?
MURAKAMI: Yeah. Manga culture grows and educates these artists. So I learned from that experience. Manga uses Japanese traditional structures in how to teach the student and to transmit a very direct message. You learn from the teacher by watching from behind his back. The whole teacher-master thing is part of Asian culture, I think. So I guess I agree with you in that respect.
Last week saw the launch of a brand new blog called Grain & Gram, a site they’re describing as a gentlemen’s journal. So far there are only two posts, but they’re extremely well crafted and filled with beautiful images, videos and graphics. The images above are from an interview with Florida screenprinter and entrepreneur Nick Sambroto who runs a little silk screen shop called Mama’s Sauce (how amazing is that name?).
I’m not a huge fan of interviews but there’s something about the medium of this that I really enjoy. I think it’s the mixture of all kinds of mediums, not just words and pictures but BIG photos, plus video, plus a few cute graphics, all wrapped into one neat shell. I guess I imagine this is how a magazine might look if it was on the web. Not just a standard magazine treatment, but something more dynamic that takes advantage of the webs very vertical existence.
The whole thing was put together by the following guys, who I think deserve a lot of credit:
The folks over at HUH. Magazine have a little interview up with director Harmony Korine who talks about his new movie Trash Humpers… yes, it’s about people who hump trash. If you’re a fan of Harmony Korine this isn’t really all that weird, but this is certainly one of his more colorful movies. It seems that the movie is only playing internationally for now but I’m hoping this comes to LA soon.
Here’s a little snippet from the interview I really liked:
The characters are pretty extreme. Unlike some of your other work, like Julien Donkey Boy, or Mister Lonely that deals with mental health issues in quite a complex way, the characters in Trash Humpers seem completely without morals.
Yeah, they just transcended morality, or that kind of balance. They destroy things, but they turned it into an art form, like they lived in terms of opposites. It was almost like they were living so much on the fringe that they became these kind of shape shifters or abstractions and their reality was what they invented, and it became something beautiful to them. All these ideas of destruction became a creative act. So in that way you can look at them almost as artists.
I’ve been a fan of Kustaa Saksi’s work for a bit now, I posted about it him back in June, so I was stoked to see that Submarine Channel had done a cool interview with him. As a part of their Pretty Cool People Interviews they delve into the minds of artists to learn a little more about them. The interview took place right before his recent show at Maxalaot Amsterdam back in December. It also gives you a behind the scenes look at a 3D sculpture he created which also grazed the cover of SHIFT.
Crailtap recently put up a list of Neck Face’s Top 5′s, a list compromised of odd little details like his ‘Top 5 Movies’ (Braveheart being his #1, wtf) and ‘Top 5 ways to bum out chicks’ (puke on them). My favorite on the list though is under the ‘Top 5 things to spend 5 bucks on’, where he gives a shout to my favorite taco truck in Los Angeles, “Three tacos and a drink at Taco Zone in Silverlake.” Clearly Neck Face knows his shit. Check out the rest of the list, it’s a fun read.
The article is called The Muckraker which is written by Lynne Hirschberg and photos by Jean-Baptiste Mondino. The article is a quick read and covers several topics, but the photos were what really excited me. I love the stark black and white-ness of the photos, as well as the textures of them. Some really beautiful images for a beautiful Sunday.
