A great, great story embodying the now-gone boom days: Louis Vuitton teamed up with Japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami for an exhibit, with a pricey store. And the "prints" were just leftover scraps! Very fitting:

LV's little "boutique" next to the Murakami exhibit in LA sold handbags and limited edition prints and such. But now a guy is suing LV, because he found out that his $6,000 print was—wait for it—leftover handbag fabric, that was just stretched on a frame and mounted.

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.

Bwahahaha. Here's the line between art and commerce: Art is ripping you off ten times more! This whole "Art as luxury materialism" embrace is just blech, so no tears for any asshole who dropped 10K on LV fabric laid out in a frame. Let's pretend this was all an object lesson in the perils of luxury fixation.
And that shit is ugly.
[LAT. Pic via]