Murakami-Louis Vuitton Love-In at Brooklyn Museum Gala

Louis Vuitton threw a lot of dough at the benefit it sponsored for the Brooklyn Museum Thursday, to open the Takashi Murakami exhibit that comes to New York via the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Nobu food, Murakami placemats, and programs with the Louis Vuitton logo and the slogan "Protecting Creativity." (BizBash has a report:
http://www.bizbash.com/newyork/content/editorial/e10584.php).

It was a shining example of how museums today are embracing the fashion industry, and vice versa, although most of the time, it's about finding the right setting and the right ladies to show off a designer's dresses, not handbags. The most powerful example in New York remains the Vogue sponsorship of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute Ball, an evening designed to promote several designers at once and deliver the most benefit to the fashion industry... all while filling the coffers of the Met.

Museums are fortunate to reap the benefits of a fashion house's marketing budget. The risk is that all the spectacle, all the attention on material goods, takes away from the museum's ability to get is mission across to gala patrons. And if the museum cannot effectively tell its story at a benefit, it risks losing the donor from the community, who may not be, after all, fashionable. Nor should they have to be.