Shop at the museum, see art at the store?

A reader tips me off to two stories that indicate Louis Vuitton will be opening some kind of store at MOCA in conjunction with the museum's Takashi Murakami retrospective. The 20,000 square-foot show opens at MOCA's Geffen Contemporary on Oct. 29. Murakami has designed purses and more for Louis Vuitton.

The first unsourced item is from Fashion News Daily, the second was also unsourced, buried in an item published yesterday on the London-based Guardian's website.

MOCA spokesperson Lyn Winter says that the reports are inaccurate -- but refused to answer when I asked exactly what in the two stories is wrong. "I cannot comment until we make official announcements," Winter told me via email. (I hope the reports are incorrect, but as it hardly takes an 'official announcement' to explain what a news story has wrong...)

This has been a sticky area for museums in the last few years. The Met was the last museum to step over the line between exhibit and commerce. I wrote about it in 2005, in a New York Observer piece about ex-Gugg director Tom Krens' influence, pointing out that many who had criticized him later copied him:

[Met director Philippe] de Montebello is also guilty of criticizing Mr. Krens only to copy him. This spring, the Met showed a retrospective of fashions from Chanel. The exhibit was sponsored by Chanel. The Met's annual Costume Institute Benefit Gala was co-chaired by designer Karl Lagerfeld of -- yup -- Chanel. The Met's Web page, under a tab marked "educational programs," directed visitors to a special Web site for the exhibition. That site was hosted on Chanel.com. Within four clicks of visiting, a visitor was instructed on how to purchase Chanel products. In a rebuke on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times, art critic Lee Rosenbaum wrote: "[The Met] should be far stricter in drawing the line between scholarly presentation and commercial promotion."

So would it be worse if a museum decides to eliminate the dot-com and to bring the corporation's retail outlet inside the museum? Uh, yes. We're watching, MOCA.

Related: The art world is small: Louis Vuitton's senior VP for public relations and communications is Katherine Ross, aka Mrs. Michael Govan. Govan is the director of a museum just down Wilshire...

Subsequently: Don't believe everything you hear, MOCA edition; MOCA tries to explain.