The question comes because there they are, along with all sorts of other silly, expensive items in a Vuitton store in the middle of the venerable Brooklyn Museum. Yes! I ran smack across them on the 5^th floor of the museum because I could not contain my curiosity while visiting the Big Apple. That's why I hopped across the Brooklyn Bridge to see a retrospective of the 46-year-old Japanese artist/designer Takashi Murakami. He's been collaborating with the French design house since 2003, putting red cherries, pink cherry blossoms, and those typical round eyes we know from Japanese anime (animations) and manga (comics) that have brought us CUTE spelled large.

The show isn't about design, as such, although Murakami has been quoted as saying that "The shop project is not a part of the exhibition; rather it is the heart of the exhibition itself. It holds at once the aspects that fuse, reunite, and then recombine the concept of the ready-made. The Louis Vuitton project brings to life a wonderful new world." That's quite a mouth full. Considering the kind of world we have right now, fashion and fashion designers—as well as all those connected with this strange world—are not exactly contributing anything remarkable to any "wonderful new world."

The exhibit, which contains hundreds of items, has been titled ©Murakami, hinting at his work being compared to the late Andy Warhol. I'm not sure that being called a Japanese Andy is exactly a flattering moniker. It does tell us, though, that he is in business, with several workshops and about 100 employees who produce his art and its spin-offs under the apt name of Kaikai Kiki (it means something elegant as well as bizarre). But, eh, I'm getting off the subject. I wandered over to Brooklyn to see the gent's art. What has for some time bothered me about modern Japan are the wildly infantilized images that seem to counterbalance the fairly repressive lifestyle of this country. This show, then, represents it at the 'high' cultural end. What struck me is that this art, in many ways would not exist were it not for the age of computers. The paintings are often more like graphic images created by the computer rather than the hand and mind.

In this exhibit, which runs to July 13, the eyes are bombarded with images of cheerfully demoniac—it is the only way to describe them—flowers that run riot alongside his sculptures of his overbearing Mr. DOB, a Mickey Mouse imitation, who also appears everywhere in slick paintings that can only be loved by those who cannot live without their cell phones (mobiles, if you please) and play with all their many features, including taking photos where none should be taken.

The lobby of the museum is dominated by a 23-foot tall Mr. Pointy (Tongari-kun), appearing as a space-alien, 18-armed Buddha, who sits on a lotus throne. It's all very surreal, to put it mildly, and is difficult to bring alive on a page without some images.

This is art for poor little rich girls and boys, who are captured by the colors, the emptiness of meaning—at least if one considers the flower art, which often reminds this onlooker of highly decorated smileys—without perhaps realizing the darker undertones of some of the mushroom(cloud)s and skulls, the angriness of Mr. DOB's jagged teeth, and the acidic colors that hint at nuclear radiation.