Is there any other fine artist in recent memory who has the immediate pop-culture pull of Murakami? The high-low, photo-ready aesthetic he has been peddling for more than two decades has now meshed perfectly with our life-on-Instagram moment; with over 1 million followers on the platform, the artist has built an audience for himself that exceeds what any gallery could provide. And while plenty of artists collaborate with fashion lines, Murakami takes the cake: 15 years after Marc Jacobs recruited him to design what became a hugely popular and influential Louis Vuitton bag, Murakami is more ubiquitous than ever, designing low-priced duds for Uniqlo and T-shirts for Abloh’s Off-White line that now sell to hypebeasts on Grailed for $650. The artist, quite simply, is everywhere—even in the recent Drake collaboration with former foe Meek Mill, in which Drake raps about having “a lot of Murakami in the hallway.”

Francis Bacon But the busy Murakami is just as active in the white cube. He had so many gallery shows in 2018, it was as if the sun never set on one of his exhibitions. The collaborations with Abloh may have garnered a mixed critical response, to say the least, but a solo show at Perrotin ’s New York outpost this spring was ambitious enough to fill multiple floors of the Lower East Side building that the Paris-born gallery took over in 2017. The most wowing works were gigantic diptychs that nodded to the work of. They were impressive in person, sure, but they also looked really great on Instagram.