Artist Highlight

So Colby and I recently went to a museum that was displaying a small amount of work by Takashi Murakami, an awesome modern artist from Japan. 

I don't know anything about art, by the way, so if calling him "modern" is wrong, I apologize. I just mean that he's still alive. 

A lot of his stuff is really weird and surreal, and it's heavily inspired by Japanese anime styles. You can tell just from looking at it. 

Anyway, we really liked this piece:

Pretty cool, huh?

Colby decided that the reason why he liked it is because it was the only piece in there that acknowledged the oddity of the world Murakami had created. He's a pretty wise man, that Colby. (I think I probably agree with him, though. While I appreciated a lot of what the artist was "saying" about commercialism, consumerism, and marketing, a lot of it was probably just too much for my aesthetic taste.)

I also apologize because I don't know the names of any of these pieces and Google isn't being very helpful ...

While we're talking about Murakami, I'm going to show you this picture I found online of an exhibit he did in Versailles, France: 

This is one of the characters he's created, "Kiki"

How weird is that? The clash of cultures is SO AWESOME, and so surreal. Just bizarre. Loving it. Just kind of geeking out right now.