The marvelous chambers of the Chateau de Versailles boast such overwhelming splendors of decor and craft that it might seem the height of folly to pit the works of any one artist against them. But in fact, such a collaboration turns out to be a formula for great success, when the right artist is given the reins. Jeff Koons managed it in 2008, and in 2010, Japanese Pop impresario Takashi Murakami rose to the challenge. In a grand hall sporting a vaulted ceiling thick with paint and gold stands a snowman like construction, stacked spheres of grinning Technicolor flowers that sprouted gleeful tentacles and antennae, while a blonde manga minx in a near-pornographic maid’s costume offers an exuberant gesture of welcome. This is “my Versailles, manga style,” Murakami declares, throwing down the gauntlet to those who would preserve Versailles from such glorious and fantastical encounters; “I am the Cheshire cat that welcomes Alice in Wonderland with its diabolic smile, and chatters away as she wanders around the Chateau.” Across 125 color plates, this magnificent volume documents the show’s22 works, which included seven new sculptures never before exhibited. Takashi Murakami was born in Tokyo in 1963. Having studied traditional arts such as Nihonga, he quickly found ways to update their imagery through Japan’s burgeoning “otaku” (geek) culture of manga and anime. Murakami’s “Superflat” style and emphasis on readily grasp able imagery with an edge has led to a Warhol-esque production plant generating t-shirts, key chains and plush dolls alongside painting and sculpture. He has also collaborated with Marc Jacobs, Louis Vuitton and Kanye West. In 2008 Murakami was named one of Time magazine’s”100 Most Influential People,” and was the only artist to make the list.

Hiro Sugiyama founded Enlightenment. The introduction was written by Takashi Murakami both in Japanese and English. The graphic design of Enlightenment was inspired by “hyper-realist art”.

Internationally renowned Japanese artist Murakami interprets the complexity of postwar Japanese art in a defining and spectacularly well-illustrated bilingual (English and Japanese) volume. Murakami coined the term superflat to describe the two-dimensional aspect of manga (comics) and anime (animated television and film), pop-culture media that have greatly influenced Japanese fine art. But superflat has societal implications as well, which are revealed when Murakami and his contributors trace the impact of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Japanese art and culture (Little Boy is the code name of the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima); analyze kawaii, the culture of cuteness (think Hello Kitty); and dissect the pop-culture movement known as otaku. A dazzling array of works–ranging from the first Godzilla movie to the anime masterpiece Neon Genesis Evangelion to the provocative paintings of Chiho Aoshima–is accompanied by essays that delve deeply into their sources, themes, and resonance. The result is a superlative overview that will thrill manga and anime enthusiasts, and open up a new world of cutting-edge aesthetics and social critique to readers unversed in the fully loaded imagery and daring styles of Japan’s globally embraced artistic innovations

Manifestos by artists, authors, editors, publishers, designers, zinesters explore publishing as artistic practice.

Independent publishing, art publishing, publishing as artistic practice, publishing counterculture, and the zine, DIY, and POD scenes have proliferated over the last two decades. So too have art book fairs, an increasingly important venue―or even medium―for art. Art publishing experienced a similar boom in the 1960s and 1970s, in response to the culture’s “linguistic turn.” Today, art publishing confronts the internet and the avalanche of language and images that it enables. The printed book offers artists both visibility and tangibility. Publishing Manifestos gathers texts by artists, authors, editors, publishers, designers, zinesters, and activists to explore this rapidly expanding terrain for art practice.

The book begins in the last century, with texts by Gertrude Stein, El Lissitsky, Oswald de Andrade, and Jorge-Luis Borges. But the bulk of the contributions are from the twenty-first century, with an emphasis on diversity, including contributions from Tauba Auerbach, Mariana Castillo Deball, Ntone Edjabe, Girls Like Us, Karl Holmqvist, Temporary Services, and zubaan. Some contributors take on new forms of production and distribution; others examine the political potential of publishing and the power of collectivity inherent in bookmaking. They explore among other topics, artists’ books, appropriation, conceptual writing, non-Western communities, queer identities, and post-digital publishing. Many texts are reproduced in facsimile―including a handwritten “speculative, future-forward newspaper” from South Africa. Some are proclamatory mission statements, others are polemical self-positioning; some are playful, others explicitly push the boundaries. All help lay the conceptual foundations of a growing field of practice and theory.

Contributors
AND Publishing, Oswald de Andrade, Archive Books, Art-Rite, Rasheed Araeen, Tauba Auerbach, Michael Baers, Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, Ricardo Basbaum, Derek Beaulieu, Bernadette Corporation, Riccardo Boglione, Bombay Underground, Jorge Luis Borges, bpNichol, Kate Briggs, Broken Dimanche Press, Eleanor Vonne Brown, Urvashi Butalia, Ulises Carrión, Mariana Castillo Deball, Paul Chan, Chimurenga, Arpita Das, Anita Di Bianco, Guy Debord, Constant Dullaart, Craig Dworkin, Ntone Edjabe, Zenon Fajfer, Marina Fokidis, General Idea, Annette Gilbert, Girls Like Us, Gloria Glitzer, Marianne Groulez, Alex Hamburger, Karl Holmqvist, Lisa Holzer, Mahmood Jamal, Tom Jennings, Ray Johnson, David Jourdan, Sharon Kivland, Kione Kochi, Kwani?, Bruce LaBruce, Tan Lin, El Lissitzky, Alessandro Ludovico, Sara MacKillop, Steve McCaffery, Jonathan Monk, Simon Morris, Mosireen, León Munoz Santini, Takashi Murakami, Deke Nihilson, Aurélie Noury, Johnny Noxzema, Clive Phillpot, Michalis Pichler, Seth Price, Riot Grrrl, Carlos Soto Román, Allen Ruppersberg, Joachim Schmid, Oliver Sieber, Paul Soulellis, Matthew Stadler, Gertrude Stein, Paul Stephens, Hito Steyerl, Mladen Stilinovic, Katja Stuke, Temporary Services, Nick Thurston, TIQQUN, Elisabeth Tonnard, V. Vale, Eric Watier, Erik van der Weijde, Lawrence Weiner, Eva Weinmayr, Jan Wenzel, Stephen Willats, Gil J Wolman, zubaan

Copublished with Miss Read: The Berlin Art Book Fair

Little Nemo, Yellow Kid, Tintin, Blake et Mortimer, Mickey, Superman, Astérix, Iznogoud, Blueberry, Astro Boy, Le Chat… Ces personnages et héros nés sous la plumes des plus grands auteurs de bande dessinée n’ont pas simplement fait les délices de millions de lecteurs à travers le monde ; ils ont aussi nourri l’imaginaire de certains artistes importants de notre époque, tels Roy Lichtenstein, Erro, Takashi Murakami, Wim Delvoye ou Gilles Barbier, pour n’en citer que quelques-uns. Publié à l’occasion de l’exposition Vraoum ! trésors de la bande dessinée et art contemporain à la maison rouge, cet ouvrage s’ouvre par les textes des commissaires, David Rosenberg et Pierre Sterckx, mis en images par Sylvain Paris, et retrace le parcours de l’exposition en confrontant des planches originales parmi les plus rares ou les plus célèbres de l’histoire du 9° Art aux oeuvres contemporaines qu’elles ont inspirées.

New York City is the undisputed center of the North American art world, and its public art is one of the most evident signs of its cultural wealth. For more than 30 years, Creative Time has been an avatar of public art in the city, working to engage art and the environment, artists and the public.Creative Time: The Bookshows how a single organization made it possible for thousands of artists to present awe-inspiring works that engage, taunt, seduce, enliven, and transform a city. Creative Time artworks have been seen in spaces both lofty and modest. Light projections have appeared on the Beaux-Arts entrance to the New York Public Library and from Ground Zero in the now famous Tribute in Light Memorial to 9/11. Signage has popped up on Times Square’s Astrovision screen and along the boardwalks of Coney Island. Music has blasted in Central Park as well as under tunnels in DUMBO, Brooklyn. Creative Time’s community includes many of the world’s most dynamic, emerging, and established artists, among them Vito Acconci, Doug Aitken, Laurie Anderson, Diller + Scofidio, David Byrne, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Cai Guo-Qiang, Jenny Holzer, Ryan McGinness, Vik Muniz, Takashi Murakami, Shirin Neshat, Sonic Youth, and William Wegman.In more than 300 images from the hilarious to the elegiac this dazzling volume highlights the best and most innovative work from the organization’s 33 years. Contributors to the volume are among the most important voices in the field of public art. Their commentary collectively shapes this must-have book for anyone interested in contemporary art or in the unapologetically diverse heartbeat of New York. In keeping with Creative Time’s innovative spirit, the book itself is the result of a public art installation. Each cover is unique: a tip-on displays the colors, sound, and weather in New York recorded over a two-week period.

In recent years, a number of artists have abstracted images culled from slapstick, comic strips and films, cartoons and animation into a new representational mode to address perplexing issues about war and global conflicts, the loss of innocence and ethnic and cultural stereotyping. From Julie Mehretu’s intricately layered paintings and Arturo Herrera’s psychological collages made of Walt Disney coloring books to Ellen Gallagher’s seductively Minimalist paintings, permeated by “blackface” signs culled from minstrel performances, to Rivane Neuenschwander’s wiped-out cartoon characters, the world of comic abstraction reflects the intensely personal relationship that many contemporary artists maintain with political currents. This publication, which accompanies a Spring 2007 exhibition of the same name at The Museum of Modern Art, presents the first major investigation into this new model of representation. It features recent work by 13 artists and a selection of 30 large-scale works and installations that bridge the rift between abstraction and comics in ways that are at once critical and playful. It also includes a critical essay, interviews with the artists, and a selected exhibition history and bibliography. Features work by Polly Apfelbaum, Inka Essenhigh, Ellen Gallagher, Arturo Herrera, Michel Majerus, Julie Mehretu, Juan Munoz, Takashi Murakami, Rivane Neuenschwander, Philippe Parreno, Gary Simmons, Franz West and Sue Williams.

The arts have changed since 1885, and Les Grands Spectacles sets out to document this evolution in three phases. Starting with the invention of film and the standardisation of the bourgeois theatre-house in the late 19th century, the book then focuses on the modernisation and dissemination of the mass media after World War Two, and finally arrives at the situation of art at the beginning of the new millennium, where events cultivate a theatrical quality, and the individual’s every intimate impulse can become entertainment for the masses. Les Grands Spectacles also shows what effects these changes have had on art or have been spurred by art, and how the social significance of the sensational, the tragic or the deceptive has been understood in art and the material of the spectacle explored, extended, hijacked, altered or destroyed in artworks. Artists in the exhibition include Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Matthew Barney, Vanessa Beecroft, Maurizio Cattelan, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Marcel Duchamp, Marlene Dumas, Sylvie Fleury, Nan Goldin, Dan Graham, Richard Hamilton, Damien Hirst, Candida Höfer, Martin Kippenberger, Yves Klein, Gustav Kluge, Jeff Koons, Yayoi Kusama, El Lissitzky, Robert Longo, Paul McCarthy + Jason Rhoades, Jonathan Meese, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Otto Mühl, Takashi Murakami, Dennis Oppenheim, Raymond Pettibon, Pablo Picasso, Richard Prince, Mimmo Rotella, Dieter Roth, Ed Ruscha, Jean Tinguely, Cindy Sherman, Joel Sternfeld, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Nicola Tyson, Dziga Vertov, Catherine Wagner, Andy Warhol, Franz West, and many, many others. Essays by Magrit Brehm, Roberto Ohrt and Klaus Theweleit.

At first sight, it appears brand new, pure Tokyo pop. But The Japanese Experience: Inevitable reveals far more than the successful cloning of morphed manga motifs onto stretched canvas and museum walls. It represents eight positions in contemporary Japanese art and scrutinizes their complex visual vocabulary, noting references to Japanese and Western art traditions as frequently as the borrowing of mass culture motifs from the realms of manga and anime. Takashi Murakami’s MR. DOB questions the place of contemporary art in our global society; Aya Takano’s glowing watercolors combine Japanese sensitivity, issues of female identity, and sci-fi; Masahiko Kuwahara’s mutant animals provide shades of softness and mysterious openness, and Yoshitomo Nara’s reworking of historical Japanese woodcuts disturbs the floating world. Not only are the artists’ visual repertoires new and surprising, but their creative methods and strategies help conquer a public that is mostly untouched by contemporary art. Published in association with the Ursula Blickle Foundation.

The publication of Twisted: Urban and visionary landscapes in contemporary paintingcoincides with the exhibition of the same name, and features the work of fifteen young, international painters. These artists are defined by the figurative visual language they use, a language that does not refer to what we might normally think of as physical reality, but instead looks to the reality manifest in video and computer games, television, film, advertising, and other media. Exploring this man-made “hyperreality,” the works included here are characterized by “artificial” use of color, the “sampling” of disparate elements, and quasi-abstract patterns–presenting the viewer with a world that tends to exalt its very impermanence. The artists included are John Currin, Dexter Dalwood, Sharon Ellis, Chris Finley, Lisa Yuskavage, Michael Raedecker, David Thorpe, Takashi Murakami, Sarah Morris, Nancy Hobermann, L.C. Armstrong, Hans Broek, Damian Loeb, Jack Hallberg, Fred Tomaselli, and Paul Morrison.

With the hotly discussed resurgence of painting at the dawn of the new century, it is clear that reports of the medium’s death have been greatly exaggerated. “Painting at the Edge of the World” explores the possibilities of a redefinition and ”hybridization” of painting begun in the 1960s, examining the manifestations of these new artistic vistas in the present day. This full-color catalogue features illustrations and a variety of critical texts by some of the most exciting established and emerging critical voices working today, in addition to work by an international and intergenerational group of artists hailing from places as diverse as Brazil, Ethiopia, Germany, South Africa, Scotland, Japan, Belgium, Iran, Italy, and the United States. Designed in two sections–a gatefold plate section containing reproductions of the work, and a french-folded section containing critical essays–the book brings together a wide range of contemporary views on painting from a diverse array of disciplines, including the visual arts, film, architecture, design, and music in an attempt to assess the relevance of painting in the contemporary global context. In addition, “Painting at the Edge of the World” includes documentation of each artist’s work and an examination of their artistic methodology. Essays by: Daniel Birnbaum, Paulo Herkenhoff, Midori Matsui, Jorg Heiser, Frances Stark, Andrew Blauvelt, Reindaldo Laddaga, Yves-Alain Bois, Helio Oiticica, Takashi Murakami, Mike Kelley, and Cuauhtemoc Medina. Introduction by Douglas Fogle. Featuring artworks by: Franz Ackerman, Haluk Akakçe, Francis Alÿs, Kevin Appel, Marcel Broodthaers, John Currin, Marlene Dumas, Andreas Gursky, Eberhard Havekost, Arturo Herrera, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Udomsak Krisanamis, Jim Labie, Margherita Manzelli, Paul McCarthy, Lucy McKenzie, Julie Mehretu, Takashi Murakami, Nader, Chris Ofili, Helio Oiticica, Michael Raedecker, Thomas Scheibitz, Rudolph Stingel, Hiroshi Sugito, Paul Thek, and Richard Wright.

Intentionally confusing, misleading, disappointing and really funny, the limited edition parodies of action figures reverberate with a vicious wit and are oddly eyeball-pleasing in the manner of all kinds of toothsome 20th/21st century collage and montage art. The toys and their aggressively situationist piss-take packaging comment on pop culture commodification and the consumer habits of compulsively shopping kidults: The very process that made KAWS, Takashi Murakami, and Michael Lau art-stars on the Art Basel Miami/Armory Show/Venice Biennale tip. One of the most respected despised and influential figures in the art toy movement for the past decade, the SUCKLORD has been producing handmade bootleg action figures in very limited runs, each selling out immediately. As the plot thickens, the work of the SUCKLORD is widely collected in fine art circles, and has been auctioned at Christie’s, Freeman’s and Phillips. This exhibition catalogue will be available as a limited edition of 500 numbered copies

Greek collector Dakis Joannou is one of the preeminent collectors of contemporary art in the world, with a collection that stands as a virtual who’s who of artists from the 1980s through today. 85 of those artists are represented in Monument to Now–the most utterly relevant to today, of course. Leading curators from New York, Milan and Paris have contributed essays and selected the included artists. Designed by acclaimed graphic artist Stefan Sagmeister, the hardcover edition features a three-dimensional monument affixed to the front cover; the paperback retains some trace of the monument, perhaps a footprint of the monument on the front cover, a pop-up monument inside, or some other invention. The follow-up to Everything That’s Interesting Is New, an earlier book on the Joannou collection, Monument to Now strictly includes work dating from 1985 and later, with a focus on the artists who are most relevant now. Among many new acquisitions featured are works by Vanessa Beecroft, Maurizio Cattelan, Gregory Crewdson, Anna Gaskell, Mariko Mori, Chris Ofili, Tom Sachs, Fred Tomaselli and Kara Walker. Other included artists are Janine Antoni, Matthew Barney, Ashley Bickerton, Rineke Dijkstra, Olafur Eliasson, Robert Gober, Andreas Gursky, Peter Halley, Mike Kelley, Toba Khedoori, Jeff Koons, Paul McCarthy, Takashi Murakami, Shirin Neshat, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Cady Noland, Gabriel Orozco, Charles Ray, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Wolfgang Tillmans, Gillian Wearing, Christopher Wool and Chen Zhen.