ABSTRACT
Superflat art, as brought together under the galvanizing force of Murakami Takashi, is the best-known Japanese art movement of 1990s and early 2000s. Both social critique and an embrace of popular culture are part of the Superflat idea, but these qualities are not what give it a claim to more radical difference or the status of being its own art movement; otherwise, it could be judged a failure. Instead, one might think of Superflat art's potency as coming from the way it takes the cultural conditions of its era and weaves them into a new way of seeing and understanding the world. This includes what might be thought of as the ecology of images prevalent in Japan by the 1990s, as well as the very market-driven context of global art within which Murakami developed his ideas. It is possible and not entirely inaccurate to place Murakami's pop-inflected art within a much broader history of pop art, even within Japan.
