Move Over, Andy Warhol

Takashi murakami thinks it might be time to give the whole Louis Vuitton thing a bit of a rest. Best known for his giant, swirling, phantasmagorical canvases starring a cartoon imp named Mr. DOB, Murakami has long been Japan's hottest contemporary artist and an international art-world phenomenon. In the past two years alone, the 41-year-old painter had racked up a career's worth of milestones, including solo shows at the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art ("From Rauschenberg to Murakami" opens at the Venice Biennale on June 15). But then Louis Vuitton creative director Marc Jacobs asked Murakami to apply his loopy, bright, Hello-Kitty-on-ketamine look to a line of the company's accessories. Murakami transformed the company's classic (though dowdy) brown-and-gold bags into a multihued riot of LV logos and saucer-shape, cartoon-eye designs on a field of shocking white.