One art lawsuit is dismissed

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge has tossed out one of Clint Arthur’s two class-action lawsuits alleging that L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Louis Vuitton North America violated the Fine Prints Act, a California law that requires dealers in limited-edition art reproductions to certify their authenticity and provide information about how rare they are and how they were created.

The ruling by Judge William Highberger said that Arthur had no standing to sue the museum because he didn’t accept MOCA’s offer to refund the $2,655 he paid for three prints by Japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami at the regular museum store.

A separate federal case against Louis Vuitton concerns two different Murakami prints Arthur bought for $12,000 at an unusual special boutique the luxury goods seller had set up during a 2007-2008 exhibition of Murakami’s works at MOCA.

“To allow a purchaser to both keep his allegedly defective purchase and to get his money back . . . rewards opportunistic litigation (of which this case is a prime example),” Highberger wrote in his ruling Friday.

Arthur said Tuesday that he would appeal, contending that the decision doesn’t address what he sees as MOCA’s having deprived all its other print customers of their rights to certificates and accurate descriptions of their purchases.

--

mike.boehm@latimes.com