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日本のコンテンポラリー・アート世界のレビューと反射
奈良: ビジネスマンとしての奈良美智
HARMLESS KITTY (1994 / Tomio Koyama Gallery)
**NEW**
Yoshitomo Nara has been responding angrily to my article below. I am very sad about this.
As the Japanese translation may be the cause of some misunderstandings I have removed the Japanese translation, as there may be inconsistencies.
The article does NOT argue that Yoshitomo Nara is only interested in making money, and I have nothing critical to say about his charity activities or political actions. Rather, I believe he is, like all serious artists, interested in securing the success of his work and his place in art history. During the 1990s and 2000s "art bubble", success was mainly determined by creating value for work in the art market. I compare his strategies as an artist to achieving this with Takashi Murakami. I argue that Nara has been more successful at creating and sustaining his name as an artist, through the way in which he has produced spin-off collectibles and brands of his work, and the way in which he has involved his fans and followers in his work.
I believe this is the first article to take Nara's art practices seriously as a mature contemporary artist, looking behind the image of an eternal expressivist teenage boy.
Please read the English version and please read it carefully.
*****
On the occasion of the opening of Yoshitomo Nara's new show at Yokohama Museum of Art -- 11 years after the breakthrough show there.
http://www.nara2012-13.org
Still hip, still selling loads. How does he do it? My thoughts below. Takashi Murakami, Blum and Poe, Fumio Nanjo, Midori Matsui, Tomio Koyama, Makoto Aida: Everybody was at the opening. Nara wore a cool orange skull T-shirt. I loaded up on mori girl keyrings and girly mountain postcards. Go see the show: the new bronze sculptures are beautiful.
YOSHITOMO NARA AT PRESS CONFERENCE FOR YOKOHAMA SHOW, WITH CURATORS ERIKO KIMURA AND ERIKO KUSAKA
This is the third extract from my recently published book: BEFORE AND AFTER SUPERFLAT: A SHORT HISTORY OF JAPANESE CONTEMPORARY ART 1990-2011 (Timezone 8 / 2012).
http://www.adrianfavell.com/BASF%20blurb%20page.htm
Yoshitomo Nara as Businessman
ビジネスマンとしての奈良美智
Whatever they think of Takashi Murakami, everybody loves Yoshitomo Nara. Nara was the quieter partner in the “New Pop Revolution”, but he scored comparable local and global success while losing none of his credibility or insouciant rock star image in the process. The eternal, ageless dreamer, he even got all the girls. It always rankled with Murakami, who is driven by his “asshole competitiveness”, as he admits.
Nara was never an ideas man; he is not a theorist. He has always had very little interesting to say about his own work. It’s all in the imagery, the craft, and the feeling of the work: old fashioned aesthetics which register less in academia, but which may have much longer lasting impact. There have been few contemporary artists whose work is so apparently guileless and simple, and yet so absolutely, immediately, recognisable. The power of the work lay in just how close it is to the charm of children’s book illustration: a sheer commercialism with its insidious kowa-kawaii (creepy cute) hook, that Murakami never got close to with his brands and characters.
The fact is, after Cool Japan, they now have only each other to talk to. Both have maintained a determinately autonomous and sometimes hostile stance to the mainstream Tokyo art world, guarding their independence as agents from galleries and the media, and displaying the confidence and ego of artists that know that there is no one else locally who can touch them on the international stage. It was their shared American experience, in Los Angeles, and more generally in dealing with the American gallery system and art market, which created this alliance. They were thrown together at UCLA simply because they were both Japanese, but the friendship and mutual respect they developed lies in the depth of their respective ambitions. Murakami still calls Nara to compare strategies, or anxiously discuss his next big – maybe foolish – move.
Nara’s naïve image is a front – as it must be for an artist who has been continually exhibited, internationally famous, and is now well past 50. Nara always was, in many ways, the cooler business head of the two stars. Murakami's big sales were spectacular, but he didn’t have an extensive in-depth inventory. The suspicion of insider dealing with Gagosian, Arnault and Pinault hung over his landmark sales. The massive leaps in value during the art bubble years also meant his prices were fragile. Nara’s prices rose over the years in a steady, unbroken ascent. His works range from famous paintings that went for over $1 million in the auction house, right the way down to mass produced commercial editions selling for a few dollars on an open air market. But the big money was always in the middle range of collectibles, where his inventory was massive.
I once got caught in the Nara trap myself, trying to pick up a litho print at TKG Editions (Tomio Koyama’s small shop) in Ginza: no 70 in a series of 72, a very sweet but incredibly simple colour drawing of a angry girl exclaiming “Beh!”. The endearment is every bit as important to the sale as the name. It has always been the key to Nara’s failsafe charm – his pictures always remind you of someone. I asked the price… Wow! It seemed like a bargain, until I worked out I’d got my zeros mixed up. Not $300 but san jyuu man en, approximately $3000 at the time. If very minor multiple prints like this run off at $3000 a piece (x 72), and the most expensive for over a $1 million, the mathematics is obvious. Checking in three years later, TKG still had the very last in the series on their books. It was currently hanging in the Mori Art Museum shop, they said, and was now listed at $8000. I looked on longingly, the would-be collector. On paper, I could have made $5000 on it in three years – if I’d emptied my bank account in 2007. There was clearly a solid operation going on here. Nara has works in many major Western collections. He has been avidly collected by Sue Hancock and the Rubell family in the US, Frank Cohen in the UK. But even more significantly, Nara has strength in depth value for Japanese and Asian collectors, who have been more likely to give wide berth to Murakami.
Much of Nara’s inventory in the 2000s was in fact largely undocumented. When fakes were exposed in some Asian auction sales, it pointed to how the real power of Nara’s work lay in its unquantified nature. To satisfy my longing for a print, I could instead go buy a small copy on Spitalfields flea market in London, alongside similar “works” by English graffiti star, Banksy. Nara copies exist alongside all the works he has given away and lost track of. Nara, himself, has an elephant’s memory for people he has given work to, and has been known to fly into a wild rage with anyone who has broken the gift and tried to sell on the work. Individual works were always signed with legal contracts preventing any flipping onto the market. But at the same time, the fakes and copies have guaranteed another level of fame.
As Tomio Koyama’s longest standing and most important artist, the two had a close but difficult relationship. They had a series of arguments about sales strategies. By 2009, Nara was keen to go completely independent of the commercial gallery structure, looking for staff to man his own independent operation. In the meantime, he was always unusually powerful in dictating how Tomio Koyama presented his work. He would tip off Koyama about new artists, and foisted any number of derivative manga style and kawaii artists onto the gallerist, including several who were taught by the same teacher, Nobuya Hitsuda at Aichi City University of Art. Koyama himself always had a kawaii taste, but Nara kept them coming. During Cool Japan, the combination guaranteed a distorting effect on the value of some rather mediocre artists in Tokyo because of Koyama’s big name. And so kawaii art became what Tokyo was known for, and the sole reason why some collectors go there.
The real key to understanding Nara’s success, though, is the fact he was an artist who made his name outside the white cube of the gallery, on the pages of books. Initial reactions to Nara’s shows in the mid 1990s didn’t know whether to treat him as anything more than a character illustrator. He had been around since the late 1980s commercial design/illustration boom, and had tried unsuccessfully to present himself in this context. Some early commentaries, such as one by the influential curator Eriko Osaka, associated him with the notion of heta uma (intentionally clumsy or badly skilled art). This had been developed by conceptualists such as Hideki Nakazawa as a kind of levelling anti-art strategy in avant garde circles. But the underlying point with Nara was commercial – and nothing to do with his formal technique, which is very good. He was swept along by a different trend – the independent book publishing boom of the late 1990s. When the second book, Slash With a Knife, was picked up in late 1998 by Masakazu Takei of FOIL, it was because this small time magazine entrepreneur and photo curator had spied a non-art world market for the work. Tokyo has a large small scale book publishing industry able to produce and distribute books quickly; Japan has a ravenous appetite for printed works. Photography had similarly been pioneered in this form. Araki and Daido Moriyama made their careers through publishing in books, not hanging in galleries. It was the same story with Nara, who overnight found a huge cult audience by side stepping the conventional gallery and museum system.
Outside of the carefully controlled art market context, Nara was always indifferent about price for his works or how they were copied. Fans need to collect, he said. They have no money, and they need to be able to buy stuff as souvenirs, even if it’s next to worthless in art terms. Murakami’s entire theory was grounded in a simulationist aesthetic of “remake and remodel,” borrowing freely from commercial design and toy makers. Yet he tied himself up in legal knots by trying to sue companies that “copied” his DOB brand image. Nara just learned to let go and watch his own images reproduce. Moreover, as Murakami notoriously sought to consolidate his Fordist model of production under one roof from start to finish, Nara organised his business as a series of loose franchise contracts to outside firms who took care of business while leaving him with clean hands. And so he had Lamm Fromm stocking his products out of a base in Yoyogi, Workaholics Inc. producing made-in-China dogs for him in Harajuku, and Chronicle books publishing worldwide out of San Francisco. Yoshi Kawasaki and his company 2K by Gingham in LA took Nara’s images and did the same thing with T-shirts internationally that Masakazu Takei did with the picture books and postcards. The spin offs seemed to be infinite.
Distribution was the other side of the business. Nara’s work, however, casual as it may have seemed, showed up not only in museum shops, but in alternative art stores and off beat hipster boutiques the world over. These are the kind of fashionable stores where affluent adults, locked into a fad-obsessed adolescence well into their late 20s, 30s, even 40s, hang out and fill their lives with “cool” stuff. Once Nara started producing three dimensional toys, he positioned himself at the head of the 2000s adult vinyl collectible boom. Nara thus sold in a lot of contexts where no-one had any idea who the artist was – it just looked “cute” or “cool”. You might well own a Nara without knowing it – that was part of the charm and commercial power of his art. It was the base of a pyramid atop which stood his major auction and gallery sales.
And so Nara kept giving it all away. When he let the museum in Seoul keep all his work, Tomio Koyama argued with him about the danger to sales. Nara knew he would just get a permanent museum collection in his name. Nara may not have worried about the sales, but he was screaming down the phone and at meetings with the curators when they screwed up the catalogues or the website. Koyama was also furious about the café in Omotesando, that Nara set up with a partner as a permanent installation of his A to Z show. Parts of the famous Yokohama show were installed there, together with a small “shed” that recreated the atmosphere of the tour for fans, while charging Y700 for a cup of caffé latte. It is questionable who was the better businessman.
As A to Z became an almost permanent, endless world tour – with dozens of variations in different countries – Nara perfected a business organisation so much more effective and manageable than Murakami’s authoritarian corporate model. Nara always came over as the consummate slacker CEO, while being an extraordinarily manipulative and demanding individual according to those who worked closely with him. He succeeded by channeling the spirit of the voluntary feel good NPO. His organisational experiments in his home town, Hirosaki, were striking for how well they tapped into a different feeling in Japan after the Kobe earthquake of 1995 – the same spirit as seen again after March 2011. With local aid, he set up his art operation as a charitable NPO, with himself as a sleeping director. He got his friends and fans in to help build the exhibitions. They called all this “collaboration”. As Nara said, with a charming smile: “This is where I started to get a kick out of it – it’s like there were a hundred of me”. It was the community spirit he inspired – but it was all in his name. After A to Z, Midori Matsui was less impressed with these politics. It no longer conformed to her introvert “Micropop” theories. She criticised Nara over the Hirosaki shows for their “regressive populism”. Yet still she pointed to its basic power: of “how it had become a contemporary equivalent of folk art, representing and consoling people who feel alienated from modern art”. His home region, meanwhile, could not believe its luck. The visitors in Hirosaki or at the Aomori Museum of Art are all there to see Nara. He has become as much a part of the local tourist industry, in this sad and grey corner of Japan, as the region’s famous lacquerware or seafood.
It is hard to think of any comparable story in global contemporary art. Talk of Murakami’s explosive anger, exploitation, bad feelings and resignations have always been rife about Kaikai Kiki. Nara’s massive operation has never been portrayed as anything but an enormous and fun fan club. Not everyone was happy at Hirosaki, though. Some fans vowed they wouldn’t come back, after the hard labour involved. Nara kept his money tight, and expected everyone to pay their own way at after work drinks parties. Not everyone could live off his own preferred diet of cigarettes and curry rice. Nara’s operation was thus a rolling organization, in which he managed to get everyone working for him while having next to nobody on the payroll. Yet, as a collective art practice, Nara’s methods were never theorized as important. Paul Schimmel, for example, doesn’t get Nara at all. Ask him, and he thinks he is just stuck doing pictures of little girls and cute dogs. Well, yes, and that’s the point: at $8000 a pop Nara has been much closer to becoming like Picasso signing a beer mat than Murakami. Or, for that matter, Damian Hirst, when he signs off on another one of his automated $50,000 spin paintings. Nobody would ever describe one of Hirst’s cynical rejoinders to the emptiness of contemporary art cute or cool. Nobody loves Damian Hirst or his work, however much it is theoretically admired. Nara is almost universally adored.
Yoshitomo Nara’s identity as a populist “folk artist” – with very solid sales – may augur well for his prospects in the era after the global boom of the 2000s, just as Murakami might be dated by his association with the branded “pop life” of Warhol and Koons. It may even allow him to survive the demise of Cool Japan. Like Murakami, though, it is Japan and its long term regard for him, in the end, that Nara cares about. And on this point, Nara has unquestionably ruled as the most popular and visible contemporary Japanese artist. It’s the fans that count. When he started writing his blog before Yokohama, it was the master stroke of genius – the moment that Nara made the transition from cult pop-art star to major cultural figure. Nara has made work that is instantly recognisable, loveable, but then copyable by all. He was always an artist in whom everyone shared. There was little development in his style he moved from gallery painting to installation artist. But he alone turned his audience into Nara producers as well as Nara consumers. What other major contemporary artist could send out the word and have thousands of fans making the art for him, as they did in Yokohama and Hirosaki? Forget Yoshitomo Nara? There doesn’t seem much danger of that. The audiences have kept growing. At an opening in Japan in mid 2011, the now married 50-something artist still had a long line of teenage girls queuing for him to draw on their arms. The cult continues.
ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com
みんなからのコメント
奈良美智氏本人が、訴訟をちらつかせて本記事を批判・中傷しています(https://twitter.com/michinara3/status/231802709378994176)。更に、奈良氏は「糞ったれのウンコ野郎!」と、良識のある大人として相応しくない言葉で、本記事のライターを中傷しています(https://twitter.com/michinara3/status/231807196776775680)。本記事と、奈良氏の"プライド"の、どちらを守るべきでしょうか?
- 投稿者
村椿ららら
- 2012/08/05 10:22
よろしくショウタロウさんどんな翻訳問題でも残念に思うIm-私は、それが決して完璧でないということを知っています。イギリス人が日本のガイドの助けを借りて読まれることができるように、私は提案します。adrian
- 投稿者
adrian
- 2012/07/21 12:54
日本語訳が時々おかしい。
- 投稿者
shotaro
- 2012/07/19 08:57
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