The museum known as MOCA and the unit of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA, the world’s largest luxury goods retailer, “willfully” broke California law by selling poorly documented prints by the Tokyo-born artist Takashi Murakami, Los Angeles County resident Clint Arthur said in two complaints filed in state court in Los Angeles on June 23 and June 30. Arthur filed the complaints as class actions, or group lawsuits, on behalf of everyone who bought Murakami prints at MOCA stores in the past four years.

California’s Fine Prints Act is intended to protect buyers of art produced in multiples, according to the state’s civil code.

LVMH’s boutique at MOCA was stocked with 500 Murakami prints valued at around US$4 million during the Murakami exhibition that ran from Oct. 29, 2007, to Feb. 11, Arthur said.

“The lawsuit doesn’t challenge the authenticity of the artworks,” Daniel Engel, a lawyer for Arthur, said in a phone interview from Reseda, California.

“The question we have for the court is, ‘Why didn’t they give the information required by the law, and what did they know about the California laws?”’

“We intend to vigorously defend ourselves against this baseless litigation,” LVMH said today in a statement e-mailed to Bloomberg by spokeswoman Molly Morse of Kekst & Co. The company has “already taken a number of steps to attempt to address” Arthur’s concerns and has also “offered to buy back from him the prints he had purchased, and to repay his initial purchase price plus interest,” the statement said.

Elizabeth Hinkley, a spokeswoman for MOCA at Rogers & Cowan, said the museum is “withholding comment until we’ve looked at the lawsuits more carefully.”

Art produced in editions loses value unless it is properly documented, said Arthur, who said he paid US$855 to US$6,000 for five Murakami prints during and after the artist’s exhibition.

MOCA sold him three lower-priced prints without certificates of authenticity, and the more expensive items at LVMH’s boutique at MOCA came with certificates that omitted details such as how many copies of each print were authorized, and what materials the artist had used, according to the complaints. LVMH’s documents said the prints were signed, and they weren’t, Arthur alleged in court papers.

MOCA, whose donors include Dreamworks SKG co-founder David Geffen, stages shows of late 20th and 21st-century art and sells reproductions and prints at its stores.

LVMH, which hires high-priced artists such as Murakami and Richard Prince to design products including handbags, sold Murakami prints while it ran a boutique at MOCA during the exhibition, according to court papers.

Arthur wants LVMH and the museum to repay everyone who bought Murakami prints at MOCA stores in the past four years and to pay three times as much in damages.

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