Artist Takashi Murakami will have his career retrospective traveling to many locations. It opens this weekend at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

Linked Here is Coagula publisher Mat Gleason’s review of the exhibition.

The show runs in L.A. thru February 11, 2008, and then travels to the Brooklyn Museum (April 4 - July 13) and Frankfurt’s MMK 9/08 - January, 2009.

(L) Takashi Murakami, October 26, 2007, L.A. MOCA (R) Takashi Murakami Louis Vuitton Boutique in MOCA for duration of Murakami Retrospective Exhibit

If you read the headlines, the papers, the news, you know that our most hallowed institutions have been shamed by scandals that started with a violation of the public trust.

The Catholic church in America enabled child molesters to operate simply by moving them to other parishes when they were publicly accused.

Major League Baseball, the national past time, has seen its most revered accomplishments fall to players who have used synthetic substances to alter their physical strength and turn flyouts into homeruns and fastballs into un-hittable pitches.

So this is happening everywhere, not just art, so our respected institutions of art and culture should not be immune from becoming whorehouses. Where there was once the exhibition of publicly owned artworks and where private foundations were dedicated to highlighting and preserving the best of culture, well, there now is a Louis Vuitton store IN the museum (really, this is not a metaphor, there is a store with salespeople and cash registers - separate and exclusive from the MOCA store itself) without a shred of pretense that it is anything but a well-lit booth in a mall. Artist Takashi Murakami designed some Vuitton bags and therefore it is art because he is an artist - this is the infantile, sinister logic of a compromised, cash-starved institution.

Where the bookstores were almost trinket-free and filled with sustaining picturebooks and deep texts, we now have limited edition prints for sale, artist-endorsed pillows, skateboards, and the like. And this is at the museum bookstore, not the separate Vuitton boutique (MOCA employees don’t even get a discount at the Vuitton boutique, not that their salaries could afford them a Murakami-LV handbag).

People still throw money in the collection plate. People still go to baseball games. And people will still go to MOCA, and the artists who show there will have their name and fame positively amplified by having been on the walls there.

Oh, and by all means, go see the Murakami show - for it is certainly a spectacle, although it is NOT art - unless Disneyland, too, is art. If Disneyland is art, then MOCA is foolish to charge such a low admission. If Disneyland is art, its Alice in Wonderland and Winnie The Pooh rides utterly destroy the Murakami exhibition on every level - from their fantastic psychedelia to their paradox of childhood innocence broached by intimacy. But MOCA does have cleaner bathrooms than the Disney parks.

After you have visited the Takashi Murakami show, this bombastic, empty plastic palace of sterile child abuse, caucasian humiliation and Hyper-capitalism making even Beijing envious, well you can say you saw it.

And you can forever look MOCA director Jeremy Strick right in the eyes and call him a WHORE.

You can look MOCA curator Paul Schimmel in the eyes and call him a WHORE.

You can look at anyone associated with the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art with the same tittilation and disgust that you would aim toward Heidi Fleiss were she to walk in the room.

Maybe the priests were always sucking altar boy dick. Maybe Babe Ruth and Willie Mays popped pills. Maybe museums have always been a money laundering fence for the pretensious wealthy. But there has always been shame as a tool that society uses to police those who shatter our collective social agreements for their own vanity and gain.

So, shame on you MOCA.

MOCA has whored it out so shamelessly this time that the difference between a streetwalker and a brothel can now be defined as the clean, well-lit space on First and Alameda in Downtown Los Angeles. Whores and hucksters there will jerk you off all day - in the name of art, but in the spirit of slave-trading capitalism. Shackles optional, Roundeye Relcome.

The insight just arrived that my entire life philosophy could be summed up in one paradoxical thought:

“I have zero tolerance for zero tolerance policies”

The gallery is opened but there is a pall across the Southland - very low energy people walking about, traffic is much liter, the light everywhere is orange, filtered through a cloud of soot - a black mercedes parked outside the gallery is covered in white flecks, the white jaguar in front of it is speckled with black cinder.

I’m in here looking at some Kenny Harris paintings that have been dropped off for the next show - some collectors are already making appointments to see the work. The paintings are all about light within interior space and to look at them on this eerie day is a revelation, really, as the crisp white light he is able to pour into each room is a stark, bouyant contrast to the absolute nihilism filtering into the Los Angeles basin.

The problem now is resolving just how to light paintings about light. I can’t make much headway when the light pouring into the gallery is almost opposing what should be the light in the space during the show’s run. There is a perma-dusk, a stillness that gets unresolved with the sameness of each translucently-lit minute after maddeningly still minute.

My office does not have windows and the incandescent light here is like an oxygen hose of clarity. The Kenny Harris paintings have transformed into symbolic hope that the perfect light will soon return.

UPDATE: Where I live and where I work, we are miles and miles from these fires, from even the threat of these fires, but the whole geographic area is in the “wake” of it all. Pray for someone else if you must…

The art world is closed on Mondays, yes this is the art world rule - Museums on Sunday, banking on Monday is the common refrain. But I find I can actually get a bit more work done at the galelry on Monday than on other days. No interruptions - that is the best part. So today I had lunch with another art dealer - it was the only day we could get together - and it was like (ding! lightbulb) aha - this the way it is supposed to work. 20+ years in the art world and one can still learn something if one is open.

I may have discovered some cool cool new artists recently. Good stuff. We’ll see, a curator only needs excellence one time from an artist, a gallery needs that excellence to be consistent.