Japanese artist Takashi Murakami is not everybody's cup of triple-sugar cherry cola. To be precise, he is not mine. However, he has cornered some kind of market, presumably of people for whom the kitsch pop art of Jeff Koons is too staid and respectable now. Murakami's latest exhibition does however include a likable wheeze, a giveaway work of art.
It's a factory-made cardboard kit that folds together to make your very own miniaturised Murakami sculpture. The sculpture is a brightly coloured doll that resembles one of the works in the exhibition. Everyone likes to get a gift, and Murakami is following here in the footsteps of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who gave away sweets, posters, photographs at his shows. This is nostalgic for me, because one of the exhibitions that made me fall in love with contemporary art in the 1990s was a Gonzalez-Torres retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York. The routine of serious looking at paintings fell away like dead skin as I gleefully climbed the spiralling ramps of the Guggenheim collecting free sweets and text works. There's a childish fun about this kind of interaction between art and audience – a free gift is like something kids get in comics, and instantly hurls you back to your youth.
Murakami, in other words, is playing some insidious pop art head game with us here. The exhibition is actually full of absurdly over-the-top erotic sculptures and paintings that gleefully present sex as a commodity. They are like monumentalised images from comic books. Is he satirising sexual banality, embracing it, or a bit of both? This phantasmagoria of comic book porn offers an infantile, or at least adolescent, gratification that mirrors the pleasure of the gift. It offers a quick thrill, and that sucks us into his world – it is mental bait.
Nice idea, but it strikes me that Larry Gagosian, whose King's Cross gallery is staging the Murakami, is also sponsor of Cy Twombly's new show at Dulwich Picture Gallery. If only they would extend the scheme. A Cy Twombly giveaway would really be something ...
