T A B L E__T A L K Who pays off the debt that's brought into a marriage? Share your views on marital bliss and financial solvency in the Business and Personal Finance area of Table Talk   Search for business, personal finance and more at barnesandnoble.com Search by:  Keyword Title Author     R E C E N T L Y House flash By Heather Chaplin If you're struck with the biological urge to own a home, consider first whether it's a good time to buy (02/05/98) The Jordan Effect: What's race got to do with it? By Leon Wynter The colorblind world depicted by Madison Avenue isn't our racial reality yet -- but it's a step in the right direction (01/29/99) E-commerce: Don't believe the hype By Heather Chaplin Online shopping leaves me frustrated, bored and feeling like a schmo (01/22/98) Help! I have portfolio deficit disorder! By Daren Fonda My life fell apart after I discovered I could my check my stock's earnings and losses online -- whenever I wanted (01/15/99) Consumer retorts By Heather Chaplin The motto of the consumer warrior must be: Never surrender, never apologize and never forget there is no rational justification for $28 bank charges (01/08/99) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Money feature archives		_________- - - - - - - - - + Van Gogh Inc. YOU'VE SEEN THE PAINTINGS. NOW BUY THE LUNCH BOX. BY LARRY KANTER | During a dark moment in his brief and troubled life, Vincent van Gogh, saddled with debt and self-doubt, feared that all his labors might ultimately prove futile. "At the moment, I am working on some plum trees, yellowy white, with thousands of black branches," he wrote his younger brother Theo, a Paris art dealer who had been bankrolling his meager existence. "I am using up an enormous amount of canvases and paints. I hope it's not a waste of money for all that." If only poor Vincent could stroll through the gift shop at the Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art. It might lift his spirits considerably. Recently I spent several hours wandering the short maze of galleries that house the museum's much-publicized exhibit "Van Gogh's Van Goghs: Masterpieces From the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam," a collection of 70 works by the Dutch master. I gazed upon self-portraits, still-lifes and landscapes, taking in works ranging from the somber, earthy "The Potato Eaters" to the hallucinatory "Wheatfield With Crows." And then, as is increasingly common in "blockbuster" exhibitions such as this, I found myself deposited into the gift shop. It was there, arrayed in a row against the store's far wall, that I encountered what may have been the most arresting work of the afternoon: the Vincent van Gogh lunch box. It's a tiny tin valise, with a jaunty little handle, depicting the artist's famous sunflowers. It retails for $12.95. The lunch box is just one item in a blizzard of van Gogh merchandise found at the museum store. Spacious and brightly lit, the shop brims with racks of postcards, stacks of catalogs and boxes filled with tubes of posters. T-shirts are piled in baskets, mouse pads and screen-savers arranged in tidy rows. There are coffee mugs and wristwatches, tote bags, mini-backpacks and paperweights. A children's board game that invites players to "play, have fun and walk the path of Vincent," costs $24.95. A "Letters to Theo" stationary set retails for $9.95. A silk scarf, displaying the artist's golden wheat fields or lavender irises, fetches $98. All told, the shop features more than 100 different items, and could well represent the apex or, depending on who you ask, the nadir of museum merchandising. "I don't see any reason why a museum should treat its visitors as a bunch of morons going to a theme park, hunting for souvenirs," says Robert Hughes, Time magazine art critic and author of "American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America." Such merchandising efforts, Hughes says, represent nothing but "a condescending cloning" of an artist's work and "vulgarizes a museum." Museum officials say they're doing no such thing. "The goal was to emulate the collection and bring it into a three-dimensional format so that it can become a token or souvenir for visitors to the museum," Cim Castellon, the museum's enthusiastic general manager of merchandising, told me as I waited to hand a cashier 13 bucks for a sunflower lunch box of my own. (I couldn't resist.) "We're branching away from typical items, like postcards. We're always on the lookout for more novel items." Van Gogh beach towels and commuter mugs, though not yet available, are on the way. So is a cotton ball cap, with the artist's self-portrait atop the bill, his signature stitched on the back. "There's nothing wrong with selling books or tapes or reproductions," says Hughes. "But beach towels? Come on." Despite their apparent and oft-heralded incompatibility, art and commerce have been intertwined for centuries. And it's no secret that when the two are in proximity, questionable taste is never far behind. During the granddaddy of blockbuster shows, 1977's "Treasures of Tutankhamun," for example, the New Orleans Museum of Art sold a shiny, gold-colored sleeping bag, which children zipped up to their chins to play "boy Pharaoh in his sarcophagus." Few items at the L.A. County Museum approach that kind of audacity. But the sheer volume of stuff associated with the current van Gogh exhibit pushes the relationship between masterworks and merchandise further than most institutions dare -- for good reason. N E X T+P A G E | Museums have to do more now to take care of the bottom line