Superflat First Love

Harajuku Vuitton store decorated for May Murakami release, from Hypebeast

Multicolore Spring Palette... key holder? to be released in May.

So you may recall how Japanese artist Takashi Murakami hooked up with Louis Vuitton back in 2003 to come up with a special-edition pattern to be used on those famous bourgie handbags that used to be a status symbol, and people were calling him the new Warhol, and then there was that big Murakami exhibit in L.A. in 2007, then it went to Brooklyn, then Murakami did Kanye’s “Graduation” cover?

Well, Louis Vuitton and Murakami have collaborated again, coming up with a new series of little wallets in a multicolored print that, let’s be honest, looks almost exactly like the colorful 2003 print that was such a departure from the normal brown-and-gold LV colors.

But Louis Vuitton handbags are not interesting. What is fun is some of the is-it-shameless-marketing-or-is-it-really-clever-commentary-on-art-and-commerce advertising stuff that surrounds their collaboration. Because not only is it kind of fun to think about where you want to place it on the continuum of pure art/commerical art, it’s also super-colorful and MANIC.

For example, take the image above of a Vuitton store gussied up all colorful, or here’s a preview released yesterday of a five-minute video called Superflat First Love, available as a mobile download in Japan:

Also on the Vuitton-Murakami collaboration front, there was an interesting article a couple of weeks ago in the LA Times about how some of the people who bought prints of the Murakami Vuitton pattern for $6,000-$10,000 a pop are now pissed (and at least one is suing) after finding out that the prints are just  the same stuff used to make the handbags, framed.

This kind of makes you want to slap your forehead, because if anyone is going to drop $10,000 on a piece of art one would hope he or she did their homework enough to recognize that factory art is, uh, kind of what Murakami does. But on the other hand, I kind of hope for Murakami’s sake that this case gets a lot of press, because it would be harder to come up with a more perfect situation to make people really think about what qualifies as art.

Art Observed: preview of superflat first love

LA Times: Louis Vuitton suit adds fraud allegation

Slightly NSFW picture behind the jump…

Incidentally, all I can think of when I see anything about the Murakami-Vuitton collaboration is the big exhibit they had of Murakami stuff at the Brooklyn Museum last year.

When I went, the people whose exhibit-wandering speed matched my group’s was two calm, beautiful women with strollers speaking French and pointedly ignoring their two adorable frilly-dressed daughters. The kids were maybe three, and had clearly been worked up into a fever by the bright colors in the exhibit and were running around shrieking in crazed French.

All I’m saying is that attempting to seriously think about art like My Lonesome Cowboy, right, is really made difficult by the presence of adorable shrieking French children.

And then we walked into the special Murakami gift shop smack in the middle of the exhibit, which seriously did what (I think) it was intended to do if all that “Murakami blurs the line between art and commerce and freaks people out” stuff people ascribe to him is right. Because walking out of that insane day-glo cartoon exhibit into a very clean white space with cash registers where, if you had $800 to blow, you could actually purchase one of the Vuitton-Murakami handbags was incredibly surreal. Doing so with little screeching French girls tearing around my ankles was even more so.