Word: arakawa
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...Japanese collectors (not that there are many) ignore the work of contemporary Japanese painters and sculptors, which is why there are some 1,500 emigre artists from Japan working in New York City today. Those who make a solid reputation on the American art scene, like the painter Shusaku Arakawa-a highly intellectual artist whose half-conceptual, half-painterly work is, as one American critic put it, "haggard with self-consciousness"are much envied in Tokyo. But the most admired living artists are all Western, with Jasper Johns at the top, closely followed by Christo, whose island-fringing project...
...simply a photographic blowup of the dictionary definition of real. It is the end product of Joseph Kosuth's struggle with the artistic problem of defining what "the real thing is." Says Kosuth gravely: "I think the importance of all art is its ideas." Japanese-born Shusaku Arakawa shows a canvas on which is handwritten a recipe for banana cake. Who, after all, could show in a picture the perfect joy of mixing, baking, sniffing and finally tasting banana cake...
This method of building the commercial into the drama is the most distinctive feature of television in Japan, a nation rapidly becoming as TV-obsessed as the U.S. In a soap opera, A Comic Housemaid, the heroine habitually complains of a racking headache in midscene, gulps down an Arakawa Drug Co. remedy and announces: "Now I'm ready for anything." One private eye uses a drugstore as rendezvous-a drugstore whose shelves are conspicuously filled with the sponsor's patent medicines. In another samurai episode, the hero vanquished a batch of evildoers, then warily approached a wayside shrine...