Last month, a video posted by the world-famous Japanese artist Takashi Murakami on social media Instagram sparked a heated discussion in art, fashion and trend circles. In the video, Takashi Murakami tells his heartbreak story — his gallery and company are facing bankruptcy due to excessive investment and the impact of the epidemic, so he has to stop some projects, including the science fiction film "Mizuki Eye 2" that lasted for nine years.
Screenshot of Takashi Murakami
Takashi Murakami's most well-known work is definitely the sunflower. But when someone justifiably tells you that it's a work of art, you may be totally rejecting it, perhaps self-deprecatingly: "This is contemporary art?" Sure enough, ordinary people like me can't understand it." However, when you stay for a few more seconds, you will be "brainwashed" by the wonderful atmosphere created by the color and image, and enter the world that is absolutely simple and absolutely interesting.
Takashi Murakami with sunflowers
Most of Murakami's works are like this sunflower, with bright colors and flat images, both cute and eerie, blending cartoons, extreme violence, and erotic elements. Similar objects may be everywhere in life, but few people can do it as extremely and flat as he does. As he put forward in his "ultra-flat" declaration in 1996, "In the future, society, customs, art, and culture will become extremely flat like Japan... Today, Japanese video games and cartoon animations best express this trait, and these have the most powerful power in world culture." "Ultra flat" has multiple meanings, not only referring to the characteristics of Japanese painting and cartoons (compared to Western perspective, Japanese painting is flat), but also a description of Japanese society.
After World War II, Japan experienced a bubble economy and a "lost decade." The shadow of war hangs over the head, and the reality of falling incomes, unemployment and a surge in crime rates is in front of you. Young people turn their backs on hopeless real life and plunge into the virtual world constructed by comics, games, and novels, seeking comfort in it and actively staying away from political life. Otaku culture followed. "Flat" is both a state of youth and the position of otaku culture in the entire Japanese social culture – marginal, repressed. In addition, "flat" also represents Murakami Takashi's view of art and the public, shallowness and depth. In his view, there is no gap between first-class art and the public, and what seems childish is hidden behind real life.
Otaku and two-dimensional culture also experienced a period of marginality at the beginning of their introduction to China, but now they have become an inseparable part of mass culture. The great success of the New Year's Eve party of Station B, the game "Animal Forest Friends Association" is frequently searched, and the otaku song "Rainbow Beat" was included in the program of "Sister Riding the Wind and Waves" program group... Countless facts show that otaku culture is no longer subculture and has become mainstream.
In this context, it is obviously necessary to look back at the origins of otaku culture in Japan. From Asakusa and Yasunari Kawabata's Asakusa Red Tuan, to Murakami Takashi's "Little Boys" (intentionally named after the atomic bomb) exhibition, to the virtual world constructed by the Internet, Ian Bruma, a Japanese research expert and editor-in-chief of the New York Review of Books, has explained in a contextual way the origins of otaku culture and traditional Japanese culture, the special significance of Murakami Takashi's art for Japanese culture, and why young people use this way to confront the outside world and the future of otaku culture.
Virtual violence
Ian Bruma
Asakusa, sorrow does not stay overnight
Asakusa has always been beautiful. But 1929 was not a very good year for Asakusa. Located in Tokyo's East Ward, leaning against the Sumida River, this area is a scene from Yasunari Kawabata's Asakusa Red Ball, written in the late 1920s. Since the late 17th century, Yoshihara, a labyrinth of streets north of Asakusa, has been an officially chartered weathered area where residents range from red-card flower queens to cheap prostitutes, and the townspeople and samurai are their patrons, but the patrons sometimes wear gorgeous hats to hide their eyes. It wasn't until the 1940s that Asakusa became a paradise for pleasure. Asakusa Park has beautiful ponds and gardens, as well as Sensoji Temple, where the Sacred Kannon of Mercy is enshrined. By the late 19th century, the park was home to a variety of entertainment: a Kabuki troupe, jugglers, several geisha, circuses, a sound studio, dancers, comic book speakers, monkeys performing, bars, restaurants and bow and arrow stalls.
The 1910s are said to have been Asakusa's wildest years. Just after the russo-Japanese War, Russian girls danced and acted to gypsy music, called "operas", adding an exotic touch to the Sixth Ward, where most theaters were located, selling women's thighs. Watching young women practice fencing is also for the same purpose. Some opera houses came for real, and the luxurious Imperial Theatre brought in an Italian Rossi from London to perform operas, but Rossi couldn't find enough singers. In his "Magic Flute", the singer had to play Pamina and the Queen of the Night, and when both characters were on stage at the same time, they had to play on the stage.
Japan's earliest cinemas, as well as Tokyo's first "skyscraper," The Pavilion (also known as the "Twelve Steps of Asakusa"), were all in Asakusa. Soon, silent films paired with excellent debaters (narrations) became more popular than restaurant shows and theaters, and Chaplin, Douglas van punk, and Clara Bow became Asakusa stars.
Regardless of size, entertainment areas usually have a fleeting quality, just like Asakusa has an atmosphere of timely fun, which may be its charm. However, in the 20th century, Asakusa was indeed on the edge, and the entire area was completely destroyed twice: once in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, when everyone was making lunch, most of it was wooden buildings, and the whole area quickly became a sea of fire; the other was in the spring of 1945, when American B-29 bombers blew up most of Tokyo, and the entire Asakusa was reduced to rubble, killing 60,000 to 70,000 people in the night.
After the 1923 earthquake, this famous park was reduced to charred ruins, the "Twelve Steps of Asakusa" looked like corrupt tree stumps, the Opera Palace was only a pile of rubble, and only Sensoji Temple was unscathed. Inside the temple, there is a statue named Kabuki, which some believe is that the statue's heroic posture blocked the menacing tongue of fire. (However, Sensoji Temple did not escape the bombing of the American Army and had to be rebuilt afterwards.) But just as Asakusa's euphoria is short-lived, so is its low tide. Cinemas, opera halls and parks were rebuilt; pickpockets, prostitutes, devotees of The Holy Kannon, sons and sons, and little bastards soon brought the park to life again. In 1929, the Foley Casino opened on the second floor of the aquarium, next door to the Entomological Museum, which escaped the devastation of the 1923 earthquake, also known as the "Worm House".
The Name of the Fulley Casino comes from the Folis Bergére in Paris. Despite rumors (apparently unfounded) that there are dancers in blonde wigs who are stripped naked on Friday nights, there is no particular indulgence here. Here, several excellent actors and comedians have been born, and some have become movie stars. The most famous of these was Kenichi Moto, who starred in Akira Kurosawa's 1945 film The Man Who Stepped on the Tiger's Tail. We can find all the maverick, vulgar and new things in Asakusa between the two wars. The Fuli Casino symbolizes the Westernized Jazz Generation of Young Japanese People, the era of "modern boys" and "modern girls", when the cultural creed was "lust, absurdity, unreasonableness".
Asakusa, the spiritual home of Yasunari Kawabata
This spirit inspired Yasunari Kawabata's early work, and his books also made Fuli Casino famous. He spent three years in Asakusa, hanging out on the street, chatting with dancers and, but he mostly just walked around and looked around. He wrote these observations into his brilliant modern novel, The Red Ball of Asakusa, which was first published in 1930. The novel's focus is not on characterization, but on expressing a new way of viewing and describing the atmosphere: quickly switching between fragmented scenes, such as a clip-out film, or a collage made of reports, advertising slogans, popular lyrics, fantasies, historical anecdotes, and urban legends. Speaking is a friendly man, wandering the streets and alleys, looking for new discoveries, telling stories that happen here and there, and who did what where; the novel is full of "lust, absurdity, and irrationality" atmosphere. A large part of this rambling way of storytelling influenced The "Caligariism" that came from European Expressionism, or the German film Dr. Caligari's Cabin. But as Donald Richie quotes Edward Sedenstick in his brilliant preface, this approach is also very much related to the story of the Edo period. Kawabata confessed to hating his early experiments with modern fiction, and he soon developed a very different, more classical style. But he still contributed a lot to Japan's roar in the 20s. In addition to the novel, he also wrote the screenplay for Sadayuki Igasaka's expressionist masterpiece A Page of Madness. The most unusual story of Asakusa Red Regiment was its serialization in the mainstream media Asahi Shimbun. As Ritchie put it, it's like Joyce's Ulysses serialized in The Times in London. This confirms the high level of culture of the Japanese media (which is almost unimaginable today) at that time, and also shows that the Japanese people are willing to read avant-garde literature in mass newspapers; and the combination of avant-garde expressionism and asakusa lower class life should also help to make the public acceptable.
The combination of upper class and lower culture is naturally part of modernism. Kawabata, like many artists of the 1920s, was interested in detective fiction and Caligalism, which was often accompanied by a fascination with violent crime. "Asakusa Red Tuan" uses a lot of slang, alluding to the popular culture of the time, which must be very difficult to translate. Even if the translator Alyssa Friedman performs well, the original style will never be fully reproduced.
Narrator / Idle Man introduces many of the lower-class roles to the reader. The silver cat Mei Gong peeled the fur of stray cats for sale; his girlfriend Bow Zi smeared arsenic on her lips and kissed her elderly ex-boyfriend on the boat and killed him; Haruko, dressed in a pleated golden dress; and Tangerine Ashin, who was "the idol of a bad girl, deservedly deserved", and had already "solved" one hundred and fifty men at the age of sixteen... These people all drifted to the red ball. Others are of the "ridiculous" genre rather than "lust": There is a man on the Asakusa playground who has a belly and a mouth and smokes on his stomach; a female streetmate who dresses like a man; and a child who cleans public toilets because he likes modern cement buildings. He wrote that the narrator was only interested in "lowly women", and that the most humble prostitutes were young maidens whose patrons were scavengers and beggars. Tachibana Ashin is one of them.
Based on the modernist style, it is not clear whether these are real people or simply the delusions of the narrator. In fact, it was the narrator himself who took the lead in pointing out the fictional elements of these stories. The focus is on well-designed scams. The bow disappears from the story for a long time, until the novel finally appears as a hair oil seller, and "selling oil" means lying and making up stories in Japanese. Bow and the narrator discuss how the story should continue. The writer said his story was a boat, like the boat where the bow murdered her ex-boyfriend. She did not orchestrate the murder, but first pleased him and fought and left. Both the traditional Japanese way of storytelling and modernism have this trait.
None of Kawabata's fictional characters have the depth of a modernist "anti-hero" like Franz Bibbkopf of Deblin's Berlin, Alexanderplatz, or Joyce's Bloom. Compared to these characters, the bow is thin compared to other characters. Kawabata, like many wandering Japanese writers, wins by conveying the atmosphere of the situation. Here's the beginning of chapter four: the dancer on stage dancing her Spanish dance (the story is true, I didn't make it up), and although a small piece of tape was attached to her upper arm, I could still clearly see the traces of her recent drug injection. At two o'clock in the morning, in the square of Sensoji Temple, sixteen or seven wild dogs barked wildly and chased a cat. Asakusa is like this, you can smell the smell of crime everywhere.
In the following paragraph, the writer is thinking about whether to write one of the characters into his story:
Another character I wanted to join, a very miserable foreigner, was the head of the water circus from the United States that year. A thirty-meter-high ladder was placed on the charred wreckage of the "East Dance Hall" dance hall, and the leader of the troupe jumped into a small pond from above. There was a fat woman who jumped down like a seagull from a height of fifteen meters, and she really looked like a seagull. Very beautiful.
Understated, hastily taken, a little sexy, confusing: lustful, absurd, unreasonable. Militarism then suppressed all frivolous hedonism, and by the late 1930s, this mood had disappeared. The bomb then leveled Asakusa to the ground, but only material was destroyed. Once again, Asakusa is showing amazing vibrancy. As a young man, Donald Ritchie followed the American occupying forces to Japan, meeting Kawabata in 1947. One didn't speak English, one didn't speak Japanese; together they climbed up the old underground tunnel tower to examine the broken asakusa. Richie later wrote:
This place used to be Asakusa. Around the majestic Temple of The Holy Guanyin, only the charred, empty square remains. I've read that there used to be women's opera houses where girls sang and danced; tattooed gamblers gathered here to bet; trained dogs, walking on their hind legs; and the fattest ladies in Japan sat here.
Today, two years after it was burned to ashes, the empty square is occupied by rows of tents and makeshift huts, and the skeletons of several buildings are gradually taking shape. The girl with her hair in a bun sat in front of the newly built tea house, but I couldn't find the fattest lady in the world. Maybe she disappeared into the fire.
Kawabata didn't say much at the time. Richie also didn't know what the older man in the winter kimono was thinking. Ritchie said the name "Bow" and Kawabata smiled and pointed his finger at Sumida.
Today's Asakusa is no different from the rest of Tokyo: crowded, commercialized, neon-lit concrete jungle, and Sensoji Temple is surrounded by nostalgic souvenir shops selling gadgets for tourists. The old 6th Ward still has a few movie theaters and vulgar strip shows, but the real stage has long since moved to the western suburbs of Tokyo, such as Shinjuku and Shibuya. However, most of the cultural activities of the 21st century are no longer happening on the streets, but in the virtual world of personal computers. The Japanese Society in New York is currently holding a Japanese pop art exhibition, Little Boy, which is the theme of this new stage in this virtual world.
Takashi Murakami's malicious "kawaii"
The curator of Little Boy is Takashi Murakami, Japan's most influential visual artist. He paints innocent and evil cartoons, is a highly successful designer (including the LV handbag), makes somewhat pornographic dolls, is an art entrepreneur, theorist, mentor, and has many apprentices in his studio, such as a complex of traditional Japanese workshops and Andy Warhol's factory. Warhol turned unintended, mass-produced commercial images into art on display at art museums; Murakami's philosophy was the opposite, using advertising, Japanese manga, animation, and video games to create art and then put the artwork back into mass culture dominated by market mechanisms.
Murakami originally studied Japanese painting (Nihonga, a modern Japanese realist style) and was an expert on the classical Huntingo school, the mainstream of Japanese art from the 15th to the 18th centuries. He believed that Japanese art was inferior to European art, and that there was a distinction between noble and vulgar. He argues that the Western world has established a hierarchical structure that sets a boundary between noble art and "subculture", while Japan has never had this phenomenon. Copying the noble art of the West is not only embarrassing for the Japanese, but also lacks creativity. In order to get rid of this phenomenon, Murakami and his followers are committed to rediscovering true Japanese traditions in the virtual "New Proteo" garbage world.
Most of these theories are formulated through various declarations, so it is inevitable that there will be a certain degree of exaggeration. Traditional Japanese art is also hierarchical, with a clear distinction between noble and lower cultures. Because of this, well-educated nobles watched noh performs, but on the noisy and dazzling kabuki stage, they performed the deaths of these nobles. The elaborate scroll paintings and screen paintings of the Kano school are mostly in the Style of Chinese literature, and the buyers are high-class samurai. These samurai considered the woodcuts of the flower queens and merchants to be the most vulgar. Some wealthy merchants developed a taste for "noble" art, but these would be considered inflammatory, just as samurai who loved the lower life would be considered absurd (hence their concealment in Yoshihara).
However, even the court painters of the Kano school did not make much difference between decorative arts and exquisite art. Overall, Japan values the mastery of past styles or masters over individual innovations. It is true that there are outstanding individualists or deviants in Japanese art, but they do not have the concept of the artist's personal uniqueness in a completely new way in the European romantic ideal. Therefore, when Japan first came into contact with Impressionism, there was no way to fully understand this concept, and some people tried to imitate it with a half-understanding, and the results were not ideal, and many Japanese painters still avoided this concept. Murakami's handbag for LV and his acrylic paint paintings belong to this artistic tradition.
Takashi Murakami xLv Advertisement (2003)
Murakami himself and his colleagues have several distinct styles. One is that many of the images have baby-like qualities: little girls with big eyes; cute furry animals; and blinking smiling mascots that are usually seen in candy boxes or children's comic strips (which adults also love in Japan too). "Kawaii" is often used to describe young girls and their preferences. Hello Kitty dolls are very kawaii, so are kittens, and so is Snoopy's furry pullover sweater. "Kawaii" stands for innocence, sweetness, and no cynicism or malice at all.
In the "Little Boy" exhibition, there are Makoto Kunikata's unvirtuous girl, Aoshima Chiho's computer-generated print, Oshima Yugi's plastic doll featuring a prepubertal girl, and Nara Yoshitomo drawing a child with big eyes. What is special about these works is that these seemingly "kawaii" images are not innocent at all, and sometimes even full of malice. On closer inspection, you will find a hint of tension about sexual violence. The big-eyed girl of Qingdao, lying naked on the branches of an apricot tree, was kawaii in every way—except that she was tied to a tree. In another work in Qingdao, a cartoon-like little girl sinks into the earth in a meteor shower like the end of the world. At first glance, the large plastic dolls look like small charms on the bags of nine-year-old elementary school students, but if you look closely, you will find that these have pedophilic connotations: half-naked children pose in various seductive poses. Murakami paints a smoking Grim Reaper head with many wreaths in his eye sockets, a stylized version of the atomic cloud.
Violence is more pronounced in other works. Oshima's "Magma God Erupts." In "Tsunami of Horror", a kawaii girl is breathing fire like a monster, and the picture is more like a traditional Buddhist hell scene. Shigeru Komatsuzaki has a particular paranoia about the Pacific War, combining comic strip exaggerations and hyperrealism in bizarre ways. There is an exaggerated heroism in the art of wartime propaganda in his work, which of course is deliberate.
Works by Chiho Aoshima
Otaku culture
Many of Japan's neo-Promes have an atmosphere of catastrophe and apocalyptic destruction, and Japanese anime and video games are also popular for world-destroying wars and monsters such as Godzilla. Murakami explained that this reflects Japan's still inability to accept past wars. During the occupation, the United States deliberately covered up the shocking news related to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leaving a very depressed mood in Japan that could not be vented. Nor has Japan really confronted the atrocities committed by its own country. Murakami believed that the United States had succeeded in turning Japan into a pacifist country filled with irresponsible consumers and encouraged them to keep making money, and then ceded war and peace-related matters to the Americans.
In the exhibition album, Murakami writes:
The United States nurtured postwar Japan and gave it new life, and americans tell us that the true meaning of life is that life is meaningless. They tell us not to think too much about people when they are alive. Our social and hierarchical structures have been dismantled. They force us to accept a system that doesn't produce "adults."
In Murakami's view, this state of inability to grow up has led to a sense of powerlessness, and the pacifist constitution proposed by the United States has deepened this perception. This constitution deprived Japan of the right to declare war. Murakami writes:
Win or lose the war, and most importantly, over the past six decades, Japan has become an experimental ground for American-style capitalism, protected in greenhouses, nourished and grown, so big that it is about to explode. The results of this experiment were very strange and perfect. Whatever the real motive behind the dropping of the atomic bomb code-named "Little Boy" on Hiroshima, we Japanese have completely become coaxed children... We often make unreasonable fuss and indulge in our own cuteness.
These are Murakami's explanations of images of bound little girls, exploding galaxies, atomic clouds, the Pacific War, big heads, and angry pre-adolescent children—these are the frustrating fantasies of Peter Pan's inner fantasies: fantasizing that his people are omnipotent and sexually invincible; while huddled in the crowded corners of a suburban apartment, typing on a keyboard on his personal computer. This is the so-called "otaku" culture, which literally means "your home", and is used to describe the millions of otaku immersed in the fantasy world of their hearts, with their heads filled with comic strips and computer games. Murakami believes that these Japanese people have no sense of responsibility for the real world, and hide in a virtual world that can make the world disappear at the click of a mouse. All of this has to do with the war, the atomic bomb, General MacArthur's spoofing of Japan, and american capitalism.
Murakami and other theorists who share this view have linked this childish fantasy of "loud noise" and "omnipotence" to the actual violence of Aum Shinrikyo. Aum Shinrikyo looks like Buddhism on the surface, but it is not. In 1995, while waiting for the end of the world to come, its followers murdered Tokyo subway passengers with sarin gas without warning. They also used doomsday fantasies to blow up the meaninglessness of the post-war greenhouse. The difference is that many of these blind men and women are well-educated scientists, led by a half-blind spiritual mentor, Akira Asahara, who sincerely believe that a declaration of war on the world will find utopia.
Aum Shinrikyo has a paranoia that believes the world is ruled by secret Jewish gangs. What it has in common with the otaku neo-Pro culture is a very deep sense of self-hatred. One of Murakami's most fervent admirers, the cultural critic Torinogi, wrote excitedly to Murakami: "Now is the time for us to be proud of our art. It's a subculture that those in the Western art world laugh at and see as monsters. But the crowd who attended the opening night of the exhibition in New York did not think so, and the media also made a large report. But Raki ignored the audience's reaction, still insisting: "Art is created by monsters that are the complete opposite of our daily lives." Murakami added, "We are all deformed monsters. In the eyes of Western 'human beings', we are all discriminated against and considered 'inferior'. ”
I think these are all over-exaggerations. But no one would deny that the atomic bombing was a terrible disaster, and Japan's postwar prosperity did bury the wounds of wartime. Japan's over-reliance on the United States for its defense, combined with its de facto one-party politics, has created an incomplete political consciousness that is, if not substantiated, at least possible, a position I have debated. Nor can we ignore the sense of humiliation that has been dominated by Western civilization for more than two hundred years. However, it would be far-fetched to think that modern Japanese culture can be explained in terms of post-war trauma.
Otaku all over the world
Many modern art movements that wave their flags believe they have discovered a new world. However, combining absurd and misplaced violence with sexual perversion is not unprecedented. In fact, Japanese neo-pro-Japanese art is more than just a little "lustful and absurd". Sexual fantasies about young girls, whether they are tied up or not, are not new, and Kawabata has been very passionate about this subject throughout his life. In various stages of Japanese art history, we can see various changes in "lust, absurdity, and irrationality". In the middle of the 19th century, when Asakusa itself became absurd, "lust, absurdity, and irrationality" were also popular. Playwrights such as Tsuruya Namboku wrote dark stories of violence for kabuki theaters, and woodblock printmaker Yoshinori Tsukioka also created works such as the Rope Woman. As I mentioned before, the 1920s and 1960s were equally erotic and absurd, with poster designers, cinematographers, directors, and playwrights drawing heavily from the 1920s.
The childish dolls in current art and the huge, ridiculously proportioned human genitalia in pre-modern Japanese pornography, although seemingly very different, convey a sense of powerlessness that can be traced back to Japan before General MacArthur's occupation. This may be related to the long tradition of repression in Japanese society. Who knows, it may also have something to do with overprotective mothers, who over-cared for their little boys, and when the shackles of society fell on them, these childhood memories became the lost Eden they looked forward to until their deaths. I think Murakami, Akigi, and others are right about one thing: they are fighting political incompetence; the rest are just talking about sadness. Ryogi quite rightly pointed the finger at the failure of the left to challenge national authoritarianism in the 1960s and the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty. They tried. Students mobilized, and many took to the streets to protest the U.S.-Japan agreement and the Vietnam War. In the end, political extremism has not had any effect. This is not because of political repression, but because Japan's economy has become more prosperous. Radical energies are internalized when they cannot find an outlet politically. First, the protests themselves become extremely violent, and then there is the absurd lust. We can see that there were many artists in the 70s who turned from political extremism to pornography.
In a way, this has always been the case in Japan. Japan almost became a police state during the shogunate period, and there was no room for political dissent. Instead, men were allowed to vent in designated weathering zones, and their flowers became stars of popular art and fiction. A more recent version of this phenomenon is Asakusa Kawabata. Of course, there have been times of resistance in the past, but after the successful suppression of it by those in power, absurd lust has returned.
But the latest generation of artists and consumers represented in The Little Boy exhibition seems to have lost the physical energy of their predecessors in the 1840s, 1820s and 1960s. Both the term "otaku" and another neo-Pro theorist, "缓い," which means relaxed and lazy, both represent a lack of vitality. Pornography in contemporary Japanese art is virtual, not physical, narcissistic, not shared with others, and occurs entirely in the heads of otaku. I think that from here on, it is not just a phenomenon unique to Japan.
Whether in art or life, the virtual world is a perfect choice for a person who is detached from the actions of various groups such as politics, art, sex, etc. This is why Haruki Murakami's novels have been so successful, especially in East Asia and in the West, where otaku culture is prevalent. Haruki Murakami's character is disconnected from society, often isolated from the world, living in his own imaginary world. This trend has emerged since the 1960s, silently rebelling against the extended family and its associated responsibilities. In suburban neighborhoods, the nuclear family is gradually replacing the traditional family. This trend has now taken on new developments. Precisely because the family is the main symbol of "limitation", one tends to interpret individualism in a narrow sense, hiding in "solipsism", where no one can touch you.
A different way to get out of traditional life is to reconstruct alternative families. This was the case with theater troupes and hippie communities everywhere in the 1960s. Takashi Murakami himself did this, becoming the head of an artist family. However, many of these artists fully exhibit the various characteristics of self-centeredness. The world they represent is very strangely lifeless, somewhat lazy, but in fact very frightening, a ridiculous world that is not real about sex and violence—a world that is often so beautiful that it is disturbing.
The dark motives behind civilized behavior