"Superflat, Superfluous"

 Takashi Murakami’s canvases burst like neon billboards, smiling flowers, cartoonish skulls, pop gloss so slick you could skate across it. In Tokyo, this might read as cultural critique, in New York, it risks looking like a luxury handbag display. The flaw is baked in, Murakami’s art courts criticism by being too commercial, too easy, too willing to collapse into merchandise. The New York eye, trained on Warhol’s soup cans and Basquiat’s scrawls, knows the trick well. Murakami’s “superflat” style is less revelation than repetition, a remix of pop art’s old game with shinier packaging. The danger is that the work becomes decorative rather than disruptive, art that flatters collectors instead of unsettling them. And yet, here’s the kicker, Murakami knows this. He flaunts the flaw, makes it the point. By turning criticism into currency, he forces us to ask whether the art world itself is complicit in the commodification it pretends to resist. In New York, that’s a bitter pill wrapped in sugar, hard to swallow, but impossible to spit out.