“Plastics.”

Walking through the Brooklyn Museum’s two-floor, two-giftshop retrospective of contemporary Japanese artist/entrepreneur Takashi Murakami, I couldn’t shake that quintessential bit of dialogue from “The Graduate”: “Ben — I just want to say one word to you — just one word. … Plastics.”

In “The Graduate,” the grave and prophetic “Plastics” refers to the future of business, not art — but who knew, during the late 1960s, that the then newly formed Pop art temple of Warhol, Johns, Rauschenberg, and Lichtenstein, in reverence to its founding father Duchamp, would amass an art-world congregation devoted to the vanquishing of any distinction between art and business.

Wiser and more pragmatic now — certainly less idealistic than Benjamin Braddock of “The Graduate” — we all know that the practice of the business of art has become as lucrative an endeavor as that of the art of business. Simply put, we are numb and jaded. After the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s “The Art of the Motorcycle,” and, in gearing up for the Metropolitan Museum’s “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy,” which opens next month, we can probably accept in stride the Brooklyn Museum’s “©MURAKAMI” — an unflinching and unapologetic, nearly 20,000-square-foot celebration of the lowbrow horrors and banalities of commercialism, materialism, fashion, and pop culture.

This globe-trotting show, organized by Paul Schimmel, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where it originated, worships at the temple of our culture’s arrested development. Among its hundreds of canvases, figurines, balloons, videos, handbags, and cartoons is not a single object that could be seriously described as a painting or a sculpture.

“©MURAKAMI” — even more than the Guggenheim’s fetishistic flirtation with the motorcycle, and museums’ attempts to position their well-heeled members’ and trustees’ haute couture as high art — inverts the museum from a shrine to art and culture to a space devoted to entertainment, fashion, and gift shops. If you thought that the Brooklyn Museum (whose installations of its sublime Egyptian art collection have been dumbed down in recent years) couldn’t sink any lower or become less serious-minded — think again. “©MURAKAMI,” which is nothing more than a marketing machine for the dissemination and blatant merchandising of a brand, unashamedly and officially wipes art’s slate at the Brooklyn Museum — formerly, mind you, the “Brooklyn Museum of Art” — clean.

Mr. Murakami (b. 1962) is not an artist but a phenomenon: He is a businessman and a cultural commentator — at times a very talented designer — posing as a painter and a sculptor. Ubiquitous and influential, he is credited with inventing an approach to art and culture that he calls “Superflat.” In short, this term refers to the flattening of culture between high and low, but it also refers to Mr. Murakami’s own misunderstanding of those distinctions in traditional Japanese art and culture, as well as to his misunderstanding of spatial flatness in earlier Japanese painting. (But none of this really makes any difference.)

His art is big and bold and bright and fun — even in its scatological references — and children, especially toddlers and adolescent boys, will probably love it. And most, but not all, of Mr. Murakami’s subtexts of sex, genocide, and war roll easily in one eye and out the other. The results at the Brooklyn Museum are gallery after gallery of humorous, glossy, and flashy yet limply drawn cartoon characters and animations, as well as decorative paintings and sexually explicit plastic mannequins, huge Thanksgiving Day parade balloons and cartoon sculptures, stuffed animals, T-shirts, books, toys, and installations, as well as striking wallpaper patterns and (bring your credit cards) beautiful Louis Vuitton handbags. Mr. Murakami has been dubbed the Japanese Warhol. But he is something else entirely — a super-Warhol. Yes, like Warhol, he has dozens of assistants manufacturing his objects, animated cartoons, and merchandise in factories in New York and Japan; and he is fully invested in merging things American, European, and Japanese. But Mr. Murakami is not really attempting to walk the ironic line between art and commerce, as Warhol did. And why should he bother? Mr. Murakami is leading a whole movement of artists who are no longer blurring the boundaries between high and low — an artistic endeavor that has clearly become passé.

This exhibition has completely removed “high” from the equation. Nobody is sincerely pitching “©MURAKAMI” as art. And no one seems to care. Art and serious subject matter may be given lip service in the show’s catalog and wall text (works absentmindedly and after-the-fact are related to traditional Japanese screens, lacquerware, paintings, sculptures, and prints, as well as to Zen Buddhism and the horrors of the dropping of the atomic bomb). But all of those high-minded art historical and cultural allusions, even as they relate to kitsch, entertainment, and Pop art, are a ruse — a vestige of art- and museums-gone-by, where the art of the present was brought into relevant focus through its connection, its link-in-the-chain relationship, to the art of the past.

I cannot imagine that anyone will be surprised or even befuddled or amused when this show attempts to relate the twirling lasso of white ejaculate — streaming from out of the enormous erect penis in Mr. Murakami’s nude, life-size cartoon mannequin, “My Lonesome Cowboy” (1998); as well as the milk jump-rope lactating from out of the nipples of the life-size, basketball-breasted mannequin “Hiropon” (1997), the female counterpart of “Cowboy” — to the beautifully churning, frothy forms in Hokusai’s “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa” (c. 1830–32).

The curator’s attempt to connect Mr. Murakami’s objects to the Japanese prints in the Brooklyn Museum’s sublime exhibition “Utagawa: Masters of the Japanese Print, 1770–1900,” which is on view on the museum’s first floor, is indeed disturbing. But it is no less disturbing than the fact that the Brooklyn Museum has brought this work inside its doors in the first place, or that it is suggesting that Mr. Murakami’s cultural-commentary-commodities are anything more than the musings of a middle-aged man whose artistic development appears to have been arrested at 14. You do not have to be a philistine or a prude to find this show repulsive. You just have to see it for what it is — “Plastics.”

April 5 through July 13 (200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, 718-638-5000).