Murakami is not up to the location. At least Koons, with his megalomaniac marble self-portrait and an incidental bust of Louis XIV, made for another kitsch New York exhibition in the mid-1980s, showed he was familiar with the ghosts of the castle and the age-old friction between rulers and artists. So, he did away with Bernini's bust and his ego was gratified, without the need to steal space from flowers and silverware. Unfortunately, Murakami's show revolves solely around the idea of producing huge quantities of inert contemporary trash. Everything fluctuates and seems to descend from the cornucopias of the freshly restored ceilings.
Perhaps, the money saved is being used to shore up the walls and repurchase the castle furniture at auction while, at the same time, they try to fixate an intoxicating place that instils the sense of times past, not the usual gold frame but the true magic of history, in the mythology of today's art, without it costing the Versailles administrators one penny (this time Qatar is paying, as it awaits a Murakami exhibition), as well as providing springboards for artists to permanently stamp their work on the mass imagination at zero cost. It is not the courts, which in times past squabbled over great artists, your Rubens or Van Dyck, but modern-day courtesans, positioned to guard public places by prominent private collectors who loan or pre-purchase important works in these times of enormous media emphasis on what is contemporary.
That said, the characters, big and small, in this exhibition are typical of Murakami, produced by Kaikai Kiki Co. Ltd., and were prepared for this French mission, with care being taken to show only the respectable, clean and non-political ones. No Hiropon with cream spurting from her breasts or Lonesome Cowboy, ejaculating joyfully. Only the most chaste Murakami has made it into the Chateau's rooms, in ceramic or gold and silver versions, and his works make a fine show, arranged like a Japanese student's assignment on a school trip, the Sun King with a solar in the Throne room, flowers (Flower Matango) – lots of them – in the Hall of Mirrors… And so on from room to room, until you come to the beautiful, unexpected and imposing Oval Buddha outside. In his exhibition presentation, Takashi Murakami imagines himself as the Cheshire cat accompanying visitors/Alice in Wonderland. Without abusing the Japanese folk culture and its generous propensity for manga-inspired metaphors, it is more like entering an episode of Lady Oscar or The Rose of Versailles, in which the revolution is always just around the corner.
In Versailles – we should remember – the sparkling furniture of great artistic worth was often merely currency for times of recession and the walls served, then as now, to guarantee a daily spectacle of the triumph of power. In an advert published in The Financial Times last Saturday, the Gagosian Gallery that Murakami works with congratulated itself on the show in Versailles. Its new Paris premises will open in mid-October. Ivo Bonacorsi
Murakami Versailles
14 September – 12 December
