Tyler Green over at Modern Art Notes is decrying the potential (I’m saying potential, because MOCA has given a vague denial about the rumor) of there being both a Marc Jacobs and a Louis Vuitton store attached to the upcoming Takashi Murakami retrospective .
But I’m cool with the prospect of having the exhibition mega-merchandised. While I’m routinely disgusted by the crass merchandising that’s invading the museum (De Young, Quilts of Gee’s Bend, I’m looking at you), I think that there should be some kind of “pop art exception.” Murakami has always been heavily merchandised, I routinely see Angelenos wandering about, wearing their now six year old faux-mickey DOB T-shirts. The Superflat show lit a fire, linking fine art to consumer products, that still hasn’t been put out. One of the defining features of the exhibition at the Pacific Design Center was the gift shop – everyone walked out of the exhibition owning something new, slightly foreign and kawaii. To some degree, a large part of the Los Angeles art scene now orbits the tiny vinyl tchockes of what, for whatever it means, has become a legitimate “art movement.”
Murakami’s work has always had one foot in the world of luxury goods and one in the museum. A 20,000 square foot retrospective where his Louis Vuitton designs weren’t featured would be a poor one, the lack of his commercial work would be a blind spot – and in my opinion an sad attempt to differentiate between the “classes” of “fine art” and “commercial design.” Frankly, having a store in the museum would be the best and most honest way to present this part of his career and work. Seeing commercial products, brand new, as if pulled out of the shrink-wrap a moment before has always been a slightly surreal sight in a museum or gallery. It’s almost like time travel – seeing things as they once were, but devoid of the passage of time, and almost completely outside of context, surrounded by equally puzzling objects. But you could plop a Louis Vuitton store in the center of the Geffen Contemporary, stock it with Murakami merchandise, have staff, price tags, a register, the works, and it would seem perfectly in context and appropriate to me.
I realise that this is a slippery slope, that there’s the potential for a wide-eyed and cash poor MOCA to have (economic) success with this, and for their exhibition program to be drawn permanently into that orbit, and that would be bad. I don’t want to imagine a meeting where a group of MOCA decision makers say “We’ve got to have a Shepard Fairey retrospective, because it would have a cool store,” or “name an artist who’s got great T-shirts.” That’s not the kind of decision making that we need in the museum. While I’m inclined to see a Murakami retrospective as being “a bit early” and an opportunistic attempt to capitalize on one of MOCA’s real tangible successes in this decade, not having been a fly on the wall when these decisions were made forces me to withhold judgment. The more I think about it, it might be one of the smarter curatorial decisions to come out of MOCA in a while.