Murakami is often called the Japanese Andy Warhol. He's obsessed with celebrity and mass culture, and his art is packed with images drawn from Japan's leading popular art forms: manga and anime. And, like Warhol, he's largely hands-off, presiding over a factory staffed with assistants who fabricate what he calls his "art products": paintings, sculptures, helium-filled balloons, animated films, and wallpapered environments like this one, featuring his signature rictus-faced daisies.

But at this stage of his career, Murakami is looking less like Warhol and more like another great American artist-entrepreneur: Walt Disney. Warhol famously blurred the line between high art and mass culture, but there was always a trace of irony in his low-brow enthusiasms. With Murakami, that ironic distance is gone. He's not just commenting on consumer culture—he's creating it.