Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg

Great articles/reviews on Takashi Murakami's art works, introducing readers the art concepts evolving process the artist went through. These ideas/approaches will also be helpful when appreciate other modern arts

Amazing book. Absolutely love Takashi’s art

Great book!

great book at reasonable price

Essays included in the catalogue are great but the print quality of the book was bad.

Published in conjunction with a visually stunning exhibition with the same cumbersome title held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago back in summer 2017, this attractive catalog also stands on its own merits overall as a splendid art book showcasing the wildly eccentric works of a playfully significant contemporary artist in eye-popping color and detail. Largely a retrospective, a few representative works from each period are deployed to delineate the grand sweep of Murakami Takashi's artistic trajectory from the 1980's up to the very present, resulting in a well-curated overview at once accessible and perhaps appropriately lacking in depth. Several essays also helpfully introduce the artist and his distinctive work, delving into such matters as his fraught relationship with the world of traditionalist Japanese art (Nihonga) and his creative appropriation of Buddhist and folkloristic imagery.Murakami Takashi's artworks tend on the whole to be monumentally massive in scale and yet almost microscopically detailed with intricately bizarre flourishes and subplots, which presents one humdinger of a challenge when trying to reproduce these artworks at the scale of even a hefty folio volume. The hapless editors and designers have tackled this problem both with spectacular fold-out images and with a generous number of close-up shots. For the most part this works well enough, though some of the close-ups appear to be mere magnifications with a minor but noticeable loss of resolution. A small number of the works viewable at the exhibit were still unfinished when the book went to print, so it's less than totally complete--I particularly recall a towering grotesque octopus sculpture utterly absent from these pages. On the other tentacle, however, the book includes extra pieces not part of the exhibit at all, including whimsical collaborations with the art critic Tsuji Nobuo as narrated by the artist himself, so a fair enough trade-off probably. In any case, altogether a well-rounded presentation of the superflat.

Beautiful and informative. I love Takashi Murakami’s art and the book has lots of photos of his work and insightful commentary on his philosophy’s and process of his art.

Very good quality and paper book.

El libro está bien, la impresión no es de la mejor calidad

Großartig, hätte gerne die Ausstellung gesehen.

村上隆の作品を間近に感じる事が出来る作品集。英語が書いてあるため、文字を読みながら見たい方には英語力が必要。