What are you wearing at Geisai 6?

[imomus]

Geisai 6, Tokyo's annual pay-to-display youth art fair, displayed founder and organiser Takashi Murakami's usual predilections: the abject, the otaku, the cute, the perverse, cosplay, Japanese historical themes... I found a lot of the art trashy and sugary, but maybe that was the point. And I wondered if Takashi's attempts to find an alternative to curation's filtration hadn't ended up by becoming a sort of 'curation by influence'. In the end I was somewhat longing for curators and filters to sift out the dross. Never have I missed the Yokohama Triennale so sorely -- the last one was in 2001, the next one, oddly enough, will be in 2005.

In the end, I had the most fun just people-watching. What is creative young Tokyo wearing? Follow the link to find out. And follow this one for a 10MB avi video panning the Geisai mayhem.

The best contemporary art to be seen in Tokyo just now is the fantastic, playful, inventive and exhaustive Answer with Yes and No, the Tsuyoshi Ozawa show at the Mori Art Museum atop the Roppongi Hills building. Ozawa is a contemporary of Takashi Murakami's, and while he may not have had his friend's commercial success, he seems to be moving forward, developing and inventing while Takashi commercialises, establishes and consolidates.

Comments

[klaus-nomi.livejournal.com]