Takashi Murakami

Murakami took a doctorate in Nihonga, the traditional Japanese painting discipline, before turning on it — arguing that post-war Japanese visual culture had been flattened by manga and anime into something without depth or hierarchy, a condition he named Superflat and then made work inside rather than about. He founded Kaikai Kiki as a studio and production company employing dozens of people, established the GEISAI art fair to bring new artists through, and has collaborated with Louis Vuitton, Kanye West, Billie Eilish and Supreme.

The consequence for the market is an unusually wide and unusually confusing set of tiers. Unique paintings in acrylic on canvas mounted on panel sit at the top and are scarce. Below them are sculptures and figures in editions of a few hundred. Below those, and by far the largest category, are the offset lithographs and screenprints published in editions of three hundred, signed and numbered, produced steadily for two decades. And below those, collaborative product and merchandise. All four carry the name; the spread between the first and the last is several orders of magnitude.

The offset editions are where almost every conversation with an owner starts, and where expectations most need managing. They are genuine signed limited editions and they have a real and liquid market — but they were published in large numbers, many images exist in several colourways, and a great deal of what is offered online as rare is neither rare nor, in some cases, genuine. Counterfeit prints and figures circulate widely and the better fakes are convincing in a photograph.

Prices across the whole output are set principally in Hong Kong and Tokyo rather than London or New York, which affects the sale route as much as the estimate. For an owner in the UK, the practical question is often less what a work is worth than which market it should be shown to, and that decision is usually worth more than a few percentage points of commission.