The sunset over the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in Los Angeles glows with cartoon orange, red, and yellow, as if it were a rendering by Takashi Murakami of the nearby Malibu wildfires. Inside, the Japanese pop artist is celebrating his first U.S. retrospective, "© Murakami," in unabashedly American fashion: with a $50,000-a-table celebrity-encrusted dinner gala headlined by Kanye West and honoring Marc Jacobs. As guests such as Tom Ford, Christina Ricci, and James Franco filter in, flashbulbs detonating around them, they're greeted by a dozen women dressed as sexy Miss Ko2 bunnies — a popular character in Murakami's anime-like universe — in a scene more reminiscent of the Playboy mansion. "Kanye liked my sculptures and came to see me at my studio in Tokyo," Murakami tells me as he strides the crowd like a rock star, posing for pictures and signing autographs. (Apparently L.A.'s strident no-starfucking rule doesn't include gushing over international artists.) "I can't wait for him to perform. It will be a great escape."

Those who are already bored of waiting for West — who enlisted Murakami to do the artwork for his chart-topping third album, Graduation — are ditching their flutes of Möet & Chandon in the welcome hall and spilling into the 35,000-square-foot gallery for a preview of the exhibit. Boasting more than 90 genre-bending works in film (part one of Murakami's first feature-length animated film, kaikai & kiki), painting ("Tan Tan Bo Puking," a vomitous mural-size monster), and sculpture (a six-foot-tall female figurine appearing to squirt milk from her mammaries), the exhibit is crammed with the likes of Johnny Pigozzi, Dita Von Teese, and Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber admiring the art — and one another.

But generating the most buzz of all — even before tonight — is the open-for-business Louis Vuitton boutique smack in the middle of the show, displaying Murakami's boffo 2003 handbag line and selling limited edition accessories he designed specifically for the retrospective. For weeks, purists have been crying foul about art and commerce dancing the dirtiest of lambadas, and as I stand among the store's lacquered shelves, cash registers racking up sales of $960 handbags around me, I ask a blue-haired Jacobs, Louis Vuitton's creative director, about the controversy. "It's what contemporary art is supposed to do: Change the world," he replies. "He has created a world, a vocabulary." Suddenly Jacobs looks down at my footwear, an ill-advised pair of black velvet slippers with red devils on them. "Nice shoes," he says. Mistaking his off-hand politeness for an opportunity to counsel a fashion deity, I suggest that he should start making them. "Um…I don't know," he says, underwhelmed. "We'll see."

Soon the lights go down in the main hall and two huge video screens above the stage start to play the ethereal Murakami-animated video for West's new song, "Good Morning." As machine-generated smoke clouds the air, West — clad in a red shirt and red bow tie — kicks into a rollicking set backed up by partial orchestra and a woman with an electric violin who takes turns between playing the instrument and basically just gyrating around. Jumbotrons flash scenes from the crowd: Look, there's Brian Grazer with one arm around his date and the other waving in a white man's approximation of Arsenio Hall. Pharrell Williams, surrounded by an entourage of six, is rocking out next to me in the audience, clapping his hands and yelling, "Hey, ho! Hey, ho!" in time with the music when Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi come over for an air kiss. Could it all get any more surreal? Then, it does. Launching into his anti-bling hit, "Diamonds from Sierra Leone," West (left, with Alexis Phifer) sings the lyric — "Close your eyes and imagine, feel the magic, Vegas on acid seen through Yves Saint Laurent glasses" — and abruptly stops. "Louis Vuitton glasses! I meant Louis Vuitton glasses," he says apologetically, to the crowd's bewilderment, and then resumes the show.