They may not have realized it, but the folks who snapped up as much as $4-million worth of limited-edition prints by artist Takashi Murakami two years ago at the special Louis Vuitton boutique inside his exhibition at L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art apparently were getting nicely mounted handbags -- minus the snaps and straps.
At least one buyer, Clint Arthur, is steamed enough to have sued Louis Vuitton for fraud. "Louis Vuitton . . . knew that neither [Arthur] nor anyone else would pay $6,000" if it was clear they were getting factory leftovers from handbag production, says a legal memo that Arthur's attorneys filed last week in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, countering Louis Vuitton's attempt to have Judge A. Howard Matz dismiss the case as groundless.
The point of installing a boutique inside the "Copyright Murakami" exhibition at MOCA's Geffen Contemporary building was to highlight the Japanese pop artist's trademark blurring of the lines between art and commerce, MOCA officials said at the time of the 2007-08 show. But Arthur contends that selling repurposed handbag material as 500 collectible art prints priced at $6,000 and $10,000 crossed the line from commerce to fraud because Louis Vuitton allegedly hid the fact that the prints were made from the same fabric sheets as the Murakami-designed bags and accessories selling nearby for almost $1,000.
When Arthur initially sued Louis Vuitton North America and MOCA last June, those class-action lawsuits alleged only that both had failed to provide information about the artworks required under California's Fine Prints Act.
He and his attorneys added the fraud allegation in August, after finding a 2007 interview in the journal ArtInfo in which MOCA's chief curator, Paul Schimmel, admitted that he was "surprised" that Murakami "took the materials that he had printed for various [Vuitton] products . . . and he had them stretched like paintings and made into a very large but numbered edition" of prints to be sold in the boutique. Schimmel had invited the artist and Louis Vuitton to set up the store inside the Geffen exhibition -- a rare, if not unprecedented, move for a major art museum.
Attorneys for the multibillion-dollar luxury goods company argue in legal papers that Arthur has no case because, as an experienced collector of fine art prints, he should have known from the context that he might be getting something that would blur the lines between art and manufacture. "Such ambiguity is . . . part and parcel of the Murakami aesthetic and thus, was part of the bargain," says one Louis Vuitton legal memorandum in the case.
