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May 9th, 2010
Chanel Wallets used to be that good-looking waiters and cold plonk were the sole essentials of a good museum opening. Maybe there were some crackers on a tray. These days, though, no such fete is complete without a little curbside controversy, some wacko bit of theater, a harried staff of professional-event duennas and a guest list that can often seem as if it were composed by shredding the White Pages and picking names out of a hat.
Here, then, at the gala opening of the Takashi Murakami retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum on Thursday, an evening of unseasonal chill and spitting rain, was the obligatory chorus of protesters on Eastern Parkway, raising voices against the developer Bruce C. Ratner, who was being honored that night for his support of the Miu Miu Handbags at the annual Brooklyn Ball.
To those on one side of the museum’s new glass-walled addition, Mr. Ratner is a deep-pocketed patron and, as the museum’s director, Arnold Lehman, said, “a nice boychick from Cleveland, Ohio.” To those at curbside on Eastern Parkway, he was viewed less benignly, as Satan. Most developers are.
“Atlantic Yards is truly going to make a lot of people miserable,” said one protester, Eleanor Price, referring to Mr. Ratner’s $4 billion plan to refashion downtown Brooklyn into a commercial wonderland of shops, a basketball arena and fanciful buildings by Frank Gehry. “They’re using eminent domain to get rid of a lot of people and to close businesses,” Ms. Price said. “Where are they going to go?”
A similar question came up in the minds of some who, making their way past the police guard outside the museum, found themselves in a forecourt where a group of ratty stalls, the type one sees all over Chinatown, had been set up. Inside such places — with their graffiti-covered riot gates, dubious signage and with touts outside hissing in Shanghai-accented English — out-of-towners have thronged for years, to participate in the Chloe Handbags but highly illegal game of scoring cheap counterfeit luxury goods.
Or at least they did until the city’s most recent crackdown in February, when whole blocks of Chinatown were raided and dozens of businesses were padlocked.
Here, in a bit of surreal museum theater, the stalls were mocked up again. Standing outside them were men who resembled the African immigrant vendors who haul around telltale bundles of alluring, cheapish and almost-right copies of stuff from Gucci and Louis Vuitton. This time, however, these characters were playacting. The D&G Handbags laid out on trays and tarps were real Vuitton accessories. They cost, as they do in the stores, a bomb.
“There is nothing good” about the gray market in counterfeit goods, said Edward Skyler, the deputy mayor for operations, addressing a small crowd of early arrivals who had almost certainly never bartered for an $80 copy of a $1,400 bag off a blanket on the sidewalk. “There are billions of dollars in lost sales tax and revenue lost,” Mr. Skyler said as people nodded blankly and then raced inside the museum to get warm.
And there the partygoer was met by a fresh set of dilemmas, of the more manageable aesthetic sort. It seems almost Dior Handbags to bring up the controversy that erupted when the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where the Murakami show originated, set up a shop inside the museum selling Vuitton goods. A headline on this newspaper’s review of the current exhibition framed the overarching issue well: “Art With Baggage in Tow.”
The baggage in question, made since 2002 in a collaboration between Mr. Murakami and Louis Vuitton, has generated sales estimated to be in the hundreds of millions, by far the most successful such venture in the label’s history. “Vuitton has a long tradition of these collaborations, of relationships with artists, going back to the Impressionists,” Yves Carcelle, the chairman of Louis Vuitton, said on Thursday night.
Still, nothing the company ever did hit the jackpot like Mr. Murakami’s cherry-ornamented and “Multico” bags, which came about, as Mr. Carcelle explained, after 9/11, when the Vuitton designer, Marc Jacobs, suggested to his corporate bosses that Fake Handbags was no good to mourn forever: fashion had a responsibility, ahem, to help people past their grief. “Marc said,” Mr. Carcelle recalled, ” ‘If I work with Takashi, and we do something colorful, I think it will help make New York strong again.’ ”
At this, Mr. Carcelle turned his attention to Bernard Arnault, the chairman of Vuitton’s parent, LVMH Hennessy Louis Vuitton, who was progressing through the exhibition with his wife, both in their overcoats. Circling the central space, the couple ignored the servers offering lobster coral and caviar on spoons from Nobu. They sipped modestly from flutes of Champagne and made their way through a series of galleries arrayed with what seemed like a Replica Handbags of Mr. Murakami’s output, given that the 46-year-old artist runs a major art production business that employs over 100 artists, animators, writers and artisans in offices and studios in Tokyo and in Queens.
There, in one room, they passed “Flower Matango” a cheery floral extrusion of unnatural hue. There, in another room, the couple paused to inspect the early nude cartoon sculptures “Hiropon” and “My Lonesome Cowboy,” each jetting ribbons of bodily fluid into the gallery space. (It was these, as the performer Kanye West remarked to me before entertaining the dinner crowd, “that first turned me on to Takashi and what he was doing in terms of the brand.”) And there, in a darkened video room, the richest man in France stopped briefly to watch an anime-style cartoon by Mr. Murakami in which a shiny happy androgynous character says, as it buzzes through space, “The entropy in the yin corner is growing intense.” Louis Vuitton Handbags so often does.
The Arnaults had disappeared well before the dinner of tuna martinis and miso filet of beef was served, and without stopping long at the Vuitton shop where, alongside the Murakami bags, key chain holders, clutches and whatnots were some modest screened canvas scraps of artwork, in the new Monogramouflage design.
“They’re editioned canvas,” Erin Malstrom, the manager of the Vuitton store-in-museum, explained as she posed for assorted cameras in the serenely lighted gallery where the handbags are enshrined. “The first 50 in the edition are $6,000,” she added. “Nos. 51 to 100 are $10,000.”
Like the handbags, the purpose of these editions, Mr. Murakami said later, is to bring art to the hoi polloi, people in no position to lay out the $1.5 million that another French billionaire, Fran?ois Pinault, paid for a 23-foot Murakami statue of the space alien Mr. Pointy in 2003.
Anyway, it is not the money that matters to him, he insisted. “I always want the art to be accessible,” he said at dinner, where the guests included Kristen Davis, Tinsely Mortimer and Julian Schnabel. “The money embarrasses me,” he said, looking not embarrassed in the least. Asked what he enjoys doing with the wealth that has made him one of the world’s richest artists, he added, “I like making a party and losing it all.”
