Curated by Paul Schimmel

The exhibition title, “© Murakami,” flatly announces the post-Warholian position Takashi Murakami aims to occupy on the broken borderline between art and popular culture. Rendering his name a generic consumer brand, Murakami claims the benefits of intellectual property while hedging his work against the collective comic-book and video-game imaginary from which it springs. Others would sink under the weight of such a paradox, but Murakami soars—this is corporate-capitalist gnosticism, Hieronymus Bosch for the digital age, figuring a “superflat” reality squashed between angelic overworld and demonic underworld. Bringing together more than ninety paintings, objects, films, and installations made since the early 1990s, this exhaustive midcareer retrospective will provide a welcome opportunity to see how it all adds up, whether it does, and even whether it should. Travels to the Brooklyn Museum, New York, Apr. 4–July 13, 2008; and other venues.

— Jan Tumlir