Museum Minutes: Special Brooklyn Museum Takashi Murakami Edition

Some news items surrounding the opening of the Murakami show in Brooklyn... protesters, performers, swag fights, mock fake handbags, MTV and a penthouse tour...

• "Jamie Markowitz, the wife of Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, scooped up eight pricey fiberglass place mats - works of art by pop artist Takashi Murakami - set aside for guests at a glitzy Brooklyn Museum gala. The limited-edition Technicolor mats, which have sold for $1,000 on eBay after a similar event, were included in a grab bag of pricey freebies for guests celebrating the opening of the artist's three-month exhibition last Thursday. ... Radar reported that when several guests who didn't get a mat asked for one of her eight, she replied, 'You guys really should have acted faster. This is Brooklyn!'... Along with the place mats, guests at the $1,000-a-plate dinner were given rare Louis Vuitton purses designed by Murakami, including one already commanding $2,345 on eBay." - NY Daily News

• "Chants creative and classic poured from the crowd of protesters assembled behind NYPD barricades on Thursday evening outside the Brooklyn Museum. Inside, a $1000 per ticket gala headlined by Kanye West would soon honor Bruce Ratner, the controversial mega-developer behind the increasingly challenged Atlantic Yards project, for his patronage of the arts and commitment to public service and generosity. ... At its height, the spectacle outside the Museum drew nearly 100 protestors, some of whom dressed in fancy attire to mock the swanky sensibility of the event." - Village Voice

• Not only does Louis Vuitton have a store inside the Murikami exhibit, but the company created a ersatz knockoff handbag bazaar for the gala, a pretend-poor gesture of Marie Antoinette proportions: "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 goods laid out on trays and tarps were real Vuitton accessories. They cost, as they do in the stores, a bomb." Click to see photos. - Guy Trebay/NYTimes Update below.
  

• The Gowanus Lounge has video of Kanye West performing at the gala opening here. According to one blog, Mr. West was accompanied by this outlandishly attired woman.

• MTV had an easier time interviewing Murakami than Kayne.
  

• The New York Times T Magazine presents a video tour of an art-filled penthouse apartment belonging to Arnold Lehman, the BM's director.

UPDATE

• Somehow I missed this choice tidbit: Barry Hoggard reports that a portion of sales from the gala's faux knockoff handbag bazaar were donated to the Federal Enforcement Homeland Security Foundation. Say what?!