On a rainy Thursday evening earlier this month, the Brooklyn Museum hosted a gala opening party for "© Murakami," the touring midcareer retrospective of the Japanese art star Takashi Murakami. As the well-heeled guests glided out of their cabs and limos at the museum's entrance, they were greeted by a row of ratty, makeshift stalls manned by vendors hawking what looked like very convincing knockoffs of Murakami-designed Louis Vuitton handbags dotted with cherry blossoms and candy-colored logos.

But this was no ordinary sidewalk sale. The bags they were selling were real: authentic Louis Vuitton merchandise with prices to match. The vendors, played by actors hired for the occasion, were faux. Vuitton orchestrated this brilliant bit of marketing jujitsu in collaboration with the museum, touting the event in a press release as "an unprecedented and daring way to bring attention to the problem of counterfeiting." Vuitton's loopy, copy-the-copycats stunt may not have inspired a mass boycott of black marketers, but it did provide a perfect prelude to the eerily ingenious, topsy-turvy, cross-branding world of Murakami's art.