In the last few weeks we’ve written a lot about the
Painted Rooms project at San Francisco’s boutique hotel, href="http://www.sfhoteldesarts.com/hoteldesarts/index.htm">Hotel Des Arts
that was put together by StartSOMA. To
date almost 30 rooms have been hand painted by some of the best emerging artists
in the world. David Choe, Logan Hicks, Maya Hayuk, Eric Orr, Sam Flores… have
all painted amazing rooms at the hotel. It’s a project that we think is
fantastic, as it gives artists a terrific platform for their work.

Well it seems that Louis Vuitton is not as
much of a fan of Painted Rooms as we are. The company’s “ANTICOUNTERFEITING
DIRECTOR OF THE AMERICAS” has just served the hotel with a cease and desist
letter telling them that the series of hand painted floor-to-ceiling murals by
San Francisco pop artist Tim Gaskin violates their LV trademark because the
artist incorporates the LV logo into his artwork.

LV demands that the
hotel .... “remove all infringing depictions of the LV trademark from your
walls”. The letter further requests the “name and address” of the person who
created “each mural painted”, and threatened legal action for “trademark
infringement, false designation of origin, unfair competition, and trademark
dilution”.

While we’re not lawyers, and legally we have no idea who’s
right, we’re incredibly impressed that the Hotel des Arts is fighting for the
artist in this case and is not simply painting over the walls the day they got
the letter which is what most people would do when faced with legal action for a
company like LV.

Hotel des Arts’ Richard Singer said in a statement
that we just read - “Removing the LV trademark from the walls of the hotel would
necessitate destroying an original piece of fine art, and that is NOT something
we are even going to consider,” “Works of artistic expression are clearly
protected by the First Amendment, and we absolutely refuse to be censored by a
multinational corporation and their teams of lawyers”.

Good stuff.
We’ll be interested to see how this plays out. If you have any thoughts on this
one, drop us a note.