Yayoi Kusama was Part Artist, Part Luxury Branding Machine

A couple of years ago, I went to Yayoi Kusama’s Every Day I Pray for Love at Victoria Miro’s London space. The Japanese artist’s trademark polka dots were looking increasingly shaky. By that time, the late artist was 95.  There were squiggly lines, bad circles and shapes in oil paint. Give my toddler a crayon and some paper and he’ll make something similar, but the exhibition was without irony. Stuffed-fabric tentacles dangled from the ceiling, threaded through the upper gallery floor and reaching down where they lay coiled on the ground floor, 15 metres below. Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room – Beauty Described by a Spherical Heart was given centre stage. There were mirrors and it was sparkly, like something you might find next to the helter-skelter at a travelling fair. Unquestionably distinctive, but I was glad I didn’t have to queue. 

It doesn’t matter if I liked her work or not, because the market loved Kusama, and it will continue loving her in death (her passing was announced on August 14). Her auction record stands at $10.5 million for her 1959 painting Untitled (Nets), sold by Phillips in New York in 2022. When Kusama painted it, she was an unknown Japanese artist who had just arrived in New York with little money and few connections. She had sewn cash into her kimonos to get it out of Japan and soon found herself living in poverty, sometimes scavenging for food, as the story goes. Yet within two years she had made the vast white Infinity Nets that caught the attention of Donald Judd, who bought one and declared her “an original painter.” She became part of New York’s avant-garde, making paintings, sculptures and happenings that anticipated Pop, Minimalism and performance art. But recognition proved fleeting. She would spend years waiting to be rediscovered.

Her path to achieve "self-obliteration"

Kusama’s practice was much more varied than the dots and pumpkins suggest. She made vast paintings covered in a countless number of tiny loops, sculptures made by covering everyday objects in stuffed fabric (like those tentacles), her now-famous mirrored rooms and provocative performances. The latter include Narcissus Garden, Kusama’s 1966 Venice show, when she installed 1,500 mirrored balls on the lawn outside the Italian Pavilion before selling them for $2 each to visitors. Some had signs reading “Your Narcissism for Sale”.

Kusama said that a lot of her inspiration came from childhood hallucinations, when patterns seemed to spread across walls, bodies and entire rooms. Repetition became Kusama’s way of dealing with these visions and, as she put it, achieving “self-obliteration.” As a Japanese woman, she was also fighting for recognition in an art world dominated by men – some of whom were happy to steal her work.

In 1962, she began making her stuffed, fabric-covered Accumulation sculptures, transforming everyday furniture with hundreds of sewn forms. Claes Oldenburg, whose studio was in the same building, soon started making his own soft sculptures, which Kusama later claimed had been inspired by her work. This connection has been debated, but Oldenburg’s soft sculptures quickly brought him fame, while Kusama’s contribution remained comparatively overlooked.

Kusama’s fortunes began to change in the late 1980s. She came to the attention of a new generation of curators involved in reassessing the artists who had been marginalised by the male-dominated art world of the 1960s. To their eyes, her work suddenly looked remarkably prescient. Robert Miller Gallery in New York began showing her work, bringing Kusama to the attention of the market. In 1993, she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale – even though she wasn’t represented by a gallery – presiding over an installation of mirrored rooms and yellow pumpkins while dressed in a gold kimono. Major museum recognition followed and Kusama's reputation grew steadily through the 1990s and 2000s.

The popularity of her Infinity Mirror Rooms turned staid, white cube galleries into immersive spectacles. They are part art, part funfair, part selfie backdrop. Despite the first room dating back to 1965, it can feel as if they were designed for Instagram. Visitors became an army of unpaid marketers, broadcasting Kusama’s dots, mirrors and lights to millions more. At the Hirshhorn in Washington D.C., an exhibition of six Infinity Mirror Rooms drew 475,000 visitors, the museum’s biggest attendance in 40 years.

A meteoric ascent to commercial success

As Kusama’s work went viral, the brands started circling like vultures. Like the market, they loved her. In 2012, Kusama collaborated with Louis Vuitton, covering handbags, shoes, clothes and shop windows with spots and pumpkins. The fashion monolith turned its shops into huge Kusama installations, using her visual language to shift luxury handbags and other items with serious velocity. At the time, Kusama was living voluntarily in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where she had made her home since 1977. 

Louis Vuitton collaboration with Yayoi Kusama for their cruise show, 2023. Copyright Louis Vuitton

A decade later, Louis Vuitton came back for a second bite at the cherry. The artist obliged with hundreds of products and even animatronic versions of Kusama herself appearing in shop windows. By then, the woman who had once sewn money into her kimonos had reportedly amassed a fortune of around £20 million.

While her contemporary Andy Warhol morphed Campbell’s soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles and celebrities into art, turning himself into a brand along the way, Kusama propelled her dots, pumpkins and mirrors in the opposite direction, from contemporary art into luxury goods, sometimes mass produced. Warhol was perhaps the ultimate commercial artist because he understood that commerce itself could be a subject. Kusama's approach was different. She created an artistic language so distinctive that it could be detached from the art and applied almost anywhere. It’s this instant recognition that advertising agencies desperately seek. The dots were Kusama and Kusama was the dots. You didn’t need to understand her ideas about infinity or self-obliteration to want the handbag. The meaning could be discarded while the image remained.

Yayoi Kusama x Louis Vuitton Creating Infinity book. Copyright Louis Vuitton

For some, this might be a slightly uncomfortable part of her success. Her dots were born in response to the hallucinations she experienced from a young age, but by the end, her so-called “self-obliteration” had become a money-spinning logo. The pumpkins were merchandise and the mirrors were selfie machines. An intensely personal artistic vocabulary became a corporate one. I think this undermined Kusama’s artistic practice. In my mind, there’s a stark difference between an artist who becomes famous for being talented and an artist who becomes a trademark.

But perhaps calling Kusama a sell-out is unfair. She understood publicity and spectacle long before the brands arrived, although she was hardly an unwilling participant in her own transformation into a global brand. She made a fortune from it, too. After a lifetime spent trying to make the art world look at her, it’s difficult to begrudge her finally getting its attention – and her share of the proceeds, too.