The Limits of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity

Years before the polka-dotted pumpkins, before the Instagrammable Infinity Mirror Rooms, Yayoi Kusama made art that was charged with oppositional energy. Her performances, in which she painted dots onto the naked bodies of her collaborators, were an expression of ’60s counterculture. They were protests against the Vietnam War, rebukes to the art market. Her Accumulations—soft sculptures of furniture or common household items covered in stuffed, handsewn penis shapes—were hilarious critiques of phallocentrism and early examples of feminist art.  

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Kusama was, in other words, part of the artistic avant-garde. Her death, at 97, is a cold reminder that the avant-garde no longer exists. 

You could point to Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, or Keith Haring, but in many ways, no one epitomizes the collapse of the avant-garde more vividly than Kusama. I’m mostly a fan of her work. It’s very hard not to like her Infinity Mirror Room installations and playful gourds, and not to smile when you see Kusama’s endearing face framed by her signature brightly colored bobbed wig. But at a certain point, you can’t help but feel that she stopped being an artist and chose instead to become a highly profitable brand. 

In death as in life, her name bestrides a tightly managed, commercially successful global enterprise with diverse revenue streams, including high-profile partnerships with luxury labels, licensed merchandise, and strictly managed intellectual-property protection. Kusama’s large-scale sculptures and immersive installations break attendance records at museums and galleries around the world, and her works regularly set records at auction. In her final years, she was one of the world’s top-selling contemporary artists. 

Decades before all of that, though, Kusama was a creative maverick. After moving to New York from Tokyo in the late 1950s, she became a pioneer of both pop art and minimalism, then a key figure in performance art. She called her early breakthrough paintings—expansive, swirling fields of tightly packed dots—Infinity Nets. Before even Andy Warhol (although after Marcel Duchamp), she made her own persona an expression of her art, paving the way for such figures as Gilbert and George, the British-artist duo who made life itself a performance.

Seymour Wally / NY Daily News / GettyYayoi Kusama paints Kent Feathergill in 1967.

Kusama’s artworks had countercultural energy. They fought against cliché. They critiqued patriarchy. They broke down starchy inhibitions and wobbled magnificently on the edge of the rational. They tried, in other words, to open up new ways of seeing. 

That was what the avant-garde was all about: It was an attempt to see the world afresh. For many of its leading figures, from the Impressionists in the 1870s to conceptual artists a century later, this also meant proposing new and better solutions to the problem of how to be and how to live together. These proposals, many times rooted in sympathy and love, were presented as alternatives to the political structures and market logic that had so often led to war, exploitation, hopelessness, and suffering. 

Even when attempts to turn these imagined alternatives into reality failed—and often dismally—the avant-garde stood in a clear relationship to modernity’s traumas. It was like the whistle cap in the spout of a boiling kettle: both a release of suppressed pressures (psychic and cultural) and an alarm.

But society got sick of hearing the alarm. And the kettle got tired of whistling.

Kusama, having experienced a period of art-world success, had her own breakdown after returning to Tokyo permanently in 1973. Two years later, she checked herself in to a psychiatric institution, where she became a permanent resident from 1977 until her death. The institution was within walking distance of her multistory studio. 

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Her psychic travails had to do with her upbringing (she had an authoritarian mother and an unfaithful father), which left her afraid of sex and intimacy. She suffered from severe audiovisual hallucinations, in which she would see flashing lights, auras, and dense fields of dots. She fell into deep episodes of clinical depression and attempted suicide twice. 

When Kusama reemerged as an active artist in 1989, she and her supporters presented her mental-health issues not just as an important aspect of her personal story but as part of the energy that fueled her artwork. All of this was healthy frankness, but it also undoubtedly enhanced her work’s reception. People could relate to the idea of creativity as a function of—and therapy for—mental illness. 

Kusama and her promoters emphasized the link, tapping into narratives about the artist as a suffering visionary that went back to Van Gogh and even earlier artists (including such figures as Piero di Cosimo, Caravaggio, and Rosso Fiorentino) whose artistic brilliance was linked to their strange behavior and (perhaps) mental instability. In the 20th century, the idea of a connection between creativity and interior turmoil was taken up with renewed gusto, and the category of outsider art (or art brut) was established. Outsider artists could reconnect us to the amputated life of the emotions, re-enchanting a world diagnosed by Max Weber, in 1917, as disenchanted.

Kusama was one of many artists who swam with these currents. She talked about her repeating dots as an expression of an inclination toward “self-obliteration”—an urge to dissolve into forever-expanding patterns. The idea sounded at once mystical, therapeutic, and nightmarish. The idea that it might be all three only increased her appeal.

Christopher Furlong / GettyThe immersive exhibition “You, Me and the Balloons” in Manchester, England, in 2023

This second phase of Kusama’s art-world success far surpassed the first, proving, among other things, that you didn’t need to be in New York for your career to go gangbusters. She became one of the most popular artists on Earth. For museums struggling with attendances, she guaranteed box-office bonanzas. 

Her zany, luridly wigged persona helped dismantle the intimidation factor that prevents many people from relating to art and museums. Her work’s upbeat vibes and instant recognizability (spotted pumpkins!) were huge factors in her popularity. They made it easy to let go of the idea that you had to have prior knowledge or be somehow “initiated” into art before you could enjoy it.

Jim Dyson / GettyOne of the artist’s Infinity Mirror Rooms in 2008 in Liverpool, England

But the speed with which Kusama converted her popularity into massive commercial success was sobering, if only because it seemed to signal her total co-option by the market. A turning point came in 2012, when the luxury-goods brand LVMH, under the creative direction of Marc Jacobs, incorporated Kusama’s polka dots into its clothing lines, adorning stores all around the world with her designs. As Georgina Adam reported in her 2014 book, Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art Market in the 21st Century, the collaboration caused sales of Kusama’s work to take off and exposed her to audiences she would have never reached otherwise.  

From that point on, Kusama’s absorbing and fresh art, once charged by avant-garde energies, became more or less a meaning-free expression of market principles, an exercise in branding. She soon became a social-media phenomenon—the world’s most Instagrammable artist. Crowds waited in long lines just to spend 30 or 90 seconds in her Infinity Mirror Rooms taking selfies.

Kusama’s talk of self-obliteration sounds vaguely Buddhist or Taoist. But I suspect it’s more clearly seen, in the late phase of Kusama’s career, as pure capitalism at work—a function of the same logic relied on by Big Tech as it converts the liberating potential of the internet into addiction, polarization, and advertising revenue, and a drastic narrowing of human potential. You will no longer need an inner life, says this logic. You will no longer even be you. You will be data points and dollar signs. You will be ubiquitous, self-obliterating dots.

Kusama also achieved something that has eluded other artists who were co-opted by commerce and converted avant-garde energies into branding, including Warhol, Haring, Koons, and Murakami. The artist—an adorable maker of giant spotted pumpkins who lived in a psychiatric institution—became beyond criticism. You could no more criticize her than you could a grandmother giving a teddy bear to an orphan. 

Chesnot / GettyThe headquarters of the Maison Louis Vuitton in 2023 in Paris, France

I have almost always felt delight when I’ve entered one of Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms or encountered her pumpkins. But I smell something rotten behind their sameness and ubiquity. Successful branding is exactly what art at its best is not: a form of general seduction rather than specific engagement. I prefer the earlier Kusama, the artist of extraordinary boldness, who carved out thrilling new possibilities for art in a hostile, male-dominated field. For this, she paid a heavy personal price. But it didn’t stop her from making art that felt specific to her, art targeted directly at you and me.

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