The current issue of The New York Times Sunday Magazine has a great profile on artist/product designer/celebrity Takashi Murakami that’s well worth a read. I absolutely love his stuff (and that of his peers, like Yoshitomo Nara). The online version of the piece also includes a slew of photographs of his work and other artists.

One of the interesting things from the article is how integrated art and department stores are. For example, one big seller in Japan is Murakami’s take on a Louis Vuitton bag, and how popular the accompanying exhibition of the bag in the Louis Vuitton store was, with all the trimmings of a gallery opening.

”In Japan, a gallery has no meaning, and a Louis Vuitton shop is a more powerful place to see something.” The Tokyo art critic Noi Sawaragi, who was a crucial early supporter of Murakami and a peer, told me that I was imposing distinctions that no Japanese would make. ”This back and forth doesn’t seem unnatural to us,” he said. ”We have had a long history of museums with department stores as a venue. It was thanks to the Seibu Museum, which no longer exists on the 12th floor of the Seibu department store, that I developed my knowledge of contemporary art… Downstairs you find dresses, bags and shoes, but on the 12th floor you find art.”

And this additional bit:

Indeed, it is one of Murakami’s dearly held tenets that demarcations between fine art and popular merchandise are completely un-Japanese. The Japanese language didn’t even have a word for ”fine art” in 1868, when Japan embraced the West in the Meiji Restoration; only afterward did the country import this foreign ”art” notion and create a vocabulary for it. The blurring of high and low remains characteristic of Japanese society.

Read it Yourself: The Murakami Method, (Free Subscription Required)