The Artist’s Fall Collection
September 16th, 2008KERI EVILSIZOR trained a covetous eye on the handbags pristinely arrayed on white-lacquered shelves. She was not quite sure what to make of the display, housed in a 1,000-square-foot island of commerce inside the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. No matter. She was there to shop.
Pierre Verdy/Getty Images (handbag)
FASHION STATEMENTS A Marc Jacobs bag for Louis Vuitton.
Ms. Evilsizor, who had come from San Francisco nominally to see an exhibition of paintings and sculpture by the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, was delighted. Here was a luxury store — operated by Louis Vuitton, no less — in the midst of a high-tone exhibition space.
She was even able to snare a trophy, a handbag designed by Marc Jacobs, the Vuitton creative director, with the company’s monogram — and one of Mr. Murakami’s raucously colorful cartoon images. Sizing up the haute Bohemian crowd milling about in T-shirts, premium jeans and pricey knee-high boots, she noted, “There’s definitely a large percentage of people who are here for the purses.”
Visitors were indeed snapping up the limited-edition leather goods, embellished with Mr. Murakami’s cartoon hands and Chibi Kinoko mushroom-shaped characters. And most seemed to sense that they were witness to a marriage made in mercantile heaven.
The show, with its $960 handbags and $695 agendas for sale, created a flap even before its opening on Oct. 29. Art-world purists charge that it has eroded the line between culture and commerce. “It has turned the museum into a sort of upscale Macy’s,” the art critic Dave Hickey chided in an interview.
Still, at a time when artworks are purchased like luxury goods — the on-canvas equivalent of a Lamborghini or Revillon sable-lined raincoat — the shop-within-the-show serves as a rarefied marketing tool. It provides a glossy platform for both merchant and artist seeking to extend his brand, one that ideally confers a cachet that translates into galloping sales.
The first deluxe boutique to be integrated in a formal exhibition, the Murakami-Vuitton store is “a terrific example of not just the artist embracing commercial success but proactively going after it,” said Elizabeth Currid, the author of “The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art and Music Drive New York City” (Princeton University Press, 2007). In this kind of venture, everyone profits, Ms. Currid said. “You are creating a new kind of product, one that expands the economic horizons of all the parties involved.”
That venture has also trained a spotlight on a trend that is picking up steam. True, artists have aligned themselves with luxury brands since the 1930s at least, when Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau placed their surrealist stamp on fashions by Elsa Schiaparelli. But such formerly rare and mostly unsung unions are now increasingly common — and profitable. Small wonder, then, that artists of the stature of a Damien Hirst or Richard Prince are vying to lend their imprimatur to a range of designer goods.
“Artist products are the current thing,” said Jeffrey Deitch, the art dealer and a former associate of Andy Warhol, the acknowledged master of artist self-branding. A generation ago, the mating dance between culture and commerce was regarded as heresy, Mr. Deitch acknowledged. But today, he added, such alliances are “just one of the avenues available to the artist who wants to get his message to the public.”
Exhibit A: Mr. Murakami. Before he teamed up with Vuitton five years ago, he was known primarily to art aficionados. That collaboration was a marketing tour de force so spectacular that it created a waiting list in the thousands for the artist-bags. Indeed, a case could be made that it turned Mr. Murakami into a celebrity viewed by his fans as the pudgy, goateed Heath Ledger of the art world.
So where’s the rub? Mr. Murakami made his name, after all, by taking the culture of branding as his primary subject. Tellingly, his show is titled “© Murakami.”
And yet the installation — a shop that lines the pockets of the artist and his corporate partner — would appear to compromise the authority and curatorial role of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Not so says Paul Schimmel, the museum’s chief curator. He pointed out that the museum receives no rental fees or profits from the store. To do so would place its nonprofit status at risk.
Vuitton did not pay for the show; however, it did underwrite a splashy opening-night party that attracted celebrities like Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell and Pharrell Williams.
Mr. Schimmel further maintained that the boutique is integral to the artist’s message. “One of the most radical aspects of Murakami’s work is his willingness both to embrace and exploit the idea of his brand, to mingle his identity with a corporate identity and play with that,” he said. “He realized from the beginning that if you don’t address the commercial aspect of the work, it’s somehow like the elephant in the room.”
Such arguments have done their part to defuse potential controversy. The museum, said Gail Andrews, director of the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama and president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, “has made the case that luxury goods are a part of Murakami’s artistic expression. They are doing what contemporary museums do, pushing the boundaries.”
To say nothing of luring visitors into the tent. Indeed, the museum has been a major beneficiary of the collaboration. “We are certain that it has brought audiences and visibility to MOCA,” Mr. Schimmel said.
