Takashi Murakami by Ben Lewis, UK 2005, 26'

SCREENPLAY: Ben Lewis   EDITING: Ben Lewis PHOTOGRAPHY: Jeff Cooke, Richard Numeroff   SHOOTING FORMAT: digibeta MUSIC: Daniel Pemberton   PRODUCTION: Bergmann Pictures

Presented at The Screen of the Arts 2008 Drawn from the famous television series Art Safari, the film focuses on one of the most controversial contemporary artist with a sharp and ironic analysis, typical of the director Ben Lewis. Through his ostentatiously commercial and marketable works, the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami takes to the extreme what we usually think art is. A bag, a wallpaper, a record cover, become art objects if the artist puts his brand on them. One of his most popular project is, for instance, the collaboration with the fashion brand Louis Vuitton, that produced a famous bags’ series signed by the artist. Catching the Andy Warhol’s lesson about the exploitation of the idea of artist as brand and the ironic fetishist reflection on object in the art world, Murakami realizes a marketing art, where the artistic act is unseparable by the marketing and promoting processes inspired by fashion and design. Ben Lewis After his art historical studies at Cambridge and Berlin, Ben Lewis has been involved into projects concerned on music and documentaries. In few years, he created for himself a solid reputation in this last field, thanks to his playful, smart and accessible movies. He speaks about political, historical, and intellectual matters with irony and sense of humour. He lives in London and works as director of Bergmann Pictures Production. His film Nicolae Ceaucescu: The King of Communism has won the 2001 Grierson Award as best historical documentary. Selected Filmography 2001 Nicolae Ceaucescu: The King of Communism 2002 The European Union Had a Farm... E.U.E.U.O. - A Trip around the European Union; Baader Meinhof: in love with terror 2003-2007 Art Safari: Takashi Murakami; Art Safari: Maurizio Cattelan; Art Safari: Wim Delvoye; Art Safari: Sophie Calle; Art Safari: Matthew Barney; Art Safari: Santiago Sierra; Art Safari: Gregor Schneider www.benlewis.tv

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