The Art Of Takashi Murakami Comes To Boston’s Museum Of Fine Arts

The Museum of Fine Arts held their first after hours event of the season featuring the Art of Takashi Murakami. This event known as MFA Late Nights sold-out their 2,000 advanced tickets and still had plenty of walk-in patrons that lined up around the block.

Boston has been severely lacking in terms of an art scene, so featuring a fun anime inspired artist like Murakami is a step in the right direction.

However given all the hype for the exhibition the works that were actually by Murakami were surprisingly few in number.

The MFA framed the exhibition around Murakami’s contemporary renditions of classic Japanese paintings. While it is interesting to compare two similar artists side by side, it felt like the MFA was just giving an excuse to dust off some of their old paintings and fill up space.

Murakami’s work is cut from the same cloth as Andy Warhol’s; it’s very expensive pop-art. One need only to enter the gift shop to find of $80 sweat-shirts and $100 Art books. This begs the question; why go to the museum when audiences can see most of Murakami’s work online?
The images in this article are basically all of the art you will see at the Murakami exhibit.

Everything at the show was pretty cute and family friendly. Nothing was provocative or controversial. This is a shame because Murakami has done fabulously funny sculptures of anime characters skipping rope with their “bodily fluids.”
Even though I was a bit disappointed by the exhibition, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a good time. I’m very grateful to Takashi Murakami himself for attending the event in costume and taking photos with the guests.
Murakami’s art is hard not to love and his work should be on any anime fan’s radar. However, if you want more bang for your buck skip the MFA and go to Anime Boston.