The driver of the Vain Van is Emily Duffy, an artist who claims to be the inventor of the Bra Ball, an object something like a rubber band ball, except that it is made out of bras hooked end to end and wound around one another. The Bra Ball is big news mostly because it is at the center of a controversy about art, commerce, intellectual property, technology and gender, and the vagaries of trying to be a cutting-edge artist in an age that has too damn many of them.

In October 2000, Nicolino, a male artist who had been collecting bras since 1992 in hopes of someday stringing them across the Grand Canyon, decided it was time to call it quits. He had 20,000 bras and he wanted them to be used for bra art. Nicolino sent a letter to Leah Garchik, the gossip columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, in which he offered to donate his bras to the arts organization or teaching institution that could best convince him that the bras would be put to good use. Duffy, an individual artist, responded. At first, she just asked for 100 or so bras to decorate the Vain Van. Nicolino told her that wasn't possible; he didn't want to split up the collection.

Then Duffy had a idea: Wouldn't it be cool to make a giant Bra Ball? "I'm a very visual person," she says. "It just came to me. I saw it." (According to Nicolino, her exact phrase was "Do you know what a rubber band ball is?" -- to which he replied, "Perfect, Emily, a giant Bra Ball!")

According to Duffy, she first suggested the Bra Ball over the telephone, then followed up her suggestion with a written proposal. Nicolino seemed impressed by the idea. He asked her over to discuss it in person. He embellished the original idea with his own: It should go on tour across the country as the Bra Ball roadshow!

Duffy wasn't so sure that the Bra Ball needed to be put in a roadshow. And Nicolino told her that, frankly, he wasn't so sure that Duffy could execute the Bra Ball roadshow to his satisfaction. How much space did she have in her studio? (Her studio is a two-car garage in a suburban El Cerrito neighborhood -- plenty of space, according to Duffy, but not nearly the amount of space one would need to deal with, literally, 1 ton of bras, according to Nicolino, who offered her a trailer to transport the bras and was even more concerned when she declined his offer.)

In a telephone interview, Nicolino added that he felt Duffy's final proposal differed significantly from the original Bra Ball. She wanted to fill the Bra Ball with a wrapped package like a Chinese box, containing, among other things, a scalpel and a breast implant. Says Nicolino, "I'm starting to not like the negative stuff so much." But he was really unnerved when Duffy suggested limiting the Bra Ball to 3 feet in diameter, and sealing it with silicone. This center -- which Duffy called a "yolk" -- would be moved to exhibit sites, along with boxes of loose bras from Nicolino's collection, and gallery patrons would help to build the Bra Ball. It really galled Nicolino when Duffy suggested that the ball would be dismantled after each show and that bras -- the bras he'd collected from donors over an eight-year period -- would be "retired" as they wore out.

"It was too much of a compromise," says Nicolino.

Finally, over a cellphone cut with static, Duffy says, Nicolino told her he was just going to do the Bra Ball himself. He said he would credit her for the idea. She pressed him to define the word "credit." Would it mean that, at installations, her name would be listed next to his as the designer of the Bra Ball?

Well, no, not really. What Duffy heard Nicolino say is that if anyone asked where he got the idea for a giant Bra Ball, he would say that the idea came from a conversation he had with Emily Duffy.

That was not good enough. Duffy says she felt violated. She felt cheated. She wondered where a male artist got the nerve to believe he could construct a sculpture about female body image when he wasn't living in a female body.

Then Duffy got a lawyer. And she got on the Internet.

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