Yayoi Kusama, dead at 97: the artist the market loved more than the critics did

The dot that ate the art world

Yayoi Kusama has died aged 97, The Guardian reports, closing the book on a career that turned a Japanese avant-garde outsider into, in the paper’s own description, “a global superstar”. That trajectory alone is worth pausing on. Few artists move from institutional obscurity to gift-shop ubiquity, and fewer still do it on their own terms, spending decades voluntarily resident in a Tokyo psychiatric facility while continuing to produce work that museums queued up to show.

What the obituary does not quite settle, and what a companion critical piece in the same paper picks at instead, is whether Kusama’s later, spectacle-scale work - the mirrored Infinity Rooms, the giant pumpkins, the room-filling installations of dots - represented an artist expanding her ideas, or an artist and her market finding a formula that photographed well and sold tickets.

The critic versus the crowd

The Guardian’s writer recalls a telling anecdote: having delivered sceptical comments about Kusama on the BBC, they later watched Peter Gabriel defend her work with real passion in the same broadcast. The critic’s own doubts, they admit, took root at MoMA in New York, where Kusama’s dots sat alongside Jackson Pollock’s tangled colour-fields and Mondrian’s pulsing Broadway Boogie Woogie - and looked, by comparison, “static, planned, predictable”.

That’s a minority position in commercial terms. Kusama’s installations became some of the most photographed and most attended in contemporary museum history, the kind of shows that generate ticketed timed-entry slots and reliably long queues - a format that, whatever one thinks of the art, has proved extraordinarily good at getting people through the door. The critical essay’s argument is essentially that immersion substituted for engagement: the “giddy sensory overload” of the big installations was, in the writer’s words, “hard to resist” precisely because it operated on the nervous system rather than requiring you to look closely at anything.

The catch

None of this is really a dispute about facts - it’s a dispute about what museums and their audiences are for, dressed up as an obituary. Kusama’s late-career ubiquity was undeniably real and undeniably lucrative for the institutions that hosted her: an artist whose work photographs as well as hers does is a gift to any gallery trying to justify capital spend or membership drives in an era of squeezed public funding. Whether that popularity reflects the depth the critics who championed her - Gabriel included - insist is there, or whether it reflects an artist who found, late in life, the exact aesthetic frequency that Instagram was built to amplify, is precisely the question her death now leaves unresolved rather than answered.

The takeaway

Kusama’s death removes the artist from the argument but not the argument itself. She built one of the most commercially successful late-career reinventions in contemporary art, on the back of an aesthetic that divided serious critics even as it filled galleries. That tension - between what draws the crowds and what earns the critical footnotes - was true of her work while she was alive, and her passing won’t settle it. The honest verdict is the one The Guardian’s own critic reaches: admiration for the spectacle, real doubt about whether it was ever more than that.