Who’s the octopus in Takashi Murakami’s ‘The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg’?

A new exhibit of the Japanese artist’s work at the Museum of Contemporary Art is a dizzying depiction of the current cultural moment. In 2008 I was lucky enough to see "© Murakami," a significant retrospective of Japanese artist Takashi Murakami's work, at the Brooklyn Museum (the show had opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, which organized it). The exhibit was very much of that moment in time, visualizing and addressing the symptoms and aesthetics of mid- to late-2000s capitalism, right before the housing market was about to collapse the global economy.…