Takashi Murakami

"My art is not pop art," Takashi Murakami once said, correcting an interviewer. "It is a record of the struggle of the discriminated people." The Tokyo native's artwork graces the kinetic cover of Kanye West's new album, the top-selling "Graduation," which, come to think of it, also shakes and bakes social themes in its crowd-pleasing rhythms. Murakami, 36, who has a hotly anticipated show at MOCA opening Oct. 29, is a subversive hero in museums and malls everywhere.

IT'S the tuft of hair on the chin, the relief of a goatee on the smooth aluminum surface of the face, that gives the character's identity away. Otherwise, the 17-foot-high statue of a big-eyed "Oval Buddha" could be just another of Takashi Murakami's cute creations: a wandering space alien, perhaps, or a member of a tribe of ghosts. The character sits like Humpty Dumpty on the lip of a flower vase, his oversized head far too big for his tiny torso. He has a potbelly. His spine sags.

BASED on his work from the past dozen years, you might expect Takashi Murakami to be the illegitimate love child of Tinky Winky and Minnie Mouse, as home-schooled in Amida Buddhism. Or maybe the test-tube spawn of E.T. and Little Annie Fanny, given to unexpected scholarly interest in the erudite traditions of Japanese screens and scrolls. He's neither, of course.

Fresh from a performance at the Dubai Country Club, Kanye West fit right in at Sunday's gala opening of the Takashi Murakami retrospective at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. The sharp-dressed rapper-artiste, who enlisted the Japanese art star to create videos and album art for his latest release, "Graduation," would have been perfectly comfortable mingling with the designers and socialites packed into the exhibition's Louis Vuitton store.

For all the talk of the $965 limited-edition tote bag at the Louis Vuitton boutique in Takashi Murakami's exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art's Geffen Contemporary, the hottest item at the gala opening was not for sale. True, plenty of well-heeled folks visited the show's glittering commercial centerpiece Sunday night and paid good money for LV bags, coin purses and planners decorated by the man of the moment.

Marc JACOBS tilts his head to the sun like a solar panel and chain-smokes by the pool at Chateau Marmont. It's a hot Sunday afternoon and the designer has alighted in L.A. to attend the Takashi Murakami gala at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA that night, where he will be honored. Though he's acting decidedly low key, people squint and nod his way.

A pair of upended and stylized Louis Vuitton steamer trunks served as portals between our world and the color-drenched universe of Takashi Murakami at last Sunday's gala dinner celebrating the artist's exhibition at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Over there was animated flower-print wallpaper; over here the evening's blue-haired honoree, Marc Jacobs; and at each place setting were Murakami-designed place mats worth cadging from your table mates.