The Art Angle Podcast: How Yayoi Kusama Became an Unlikely Pop-Culture Phenomenon

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podcast from Artnet News that delves into the places where the art
world meets the real world, bringing each week’s biggest story down
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with input from our own writers and editors as well as artists,
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The 90-year-old Japanese artist
Yayoi Kusama is an international sensation. Exhibitions featuring
her ongoing series of “Infinity Mirrored Rooms” consistently draw
tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of visitors from all walks of
life, with many enduring multiple-hour wait times for the
opportunity to spend as little as a single minute inside the
installations (and almost undoubtedly using much of that hard-won
time to snap an obligatory selfie). 

Now, the Kusama phenomenon is
electrifying New York once again this holiday
season—and at an
unprecedented new scale. David Zwirner is currently in the midst of
“Every Day I Pray
for Love,” a solo show
by the artist that has been magnetizing nearly 2,000 visitors a day
to its West 20th Street gallery in Chelsea. And later this week,
Kusama’s work will be beamed to an estimated 23 million viewers
around the globe in the form of a monumental
artist-designed hot-air balloon that will soar through the streets of Manhattan
as a part of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. 

Yet such widespread popularity
seems even more incredible to the much smaller group of aficionados
familiar with Kusama’s artistic and personal trials, as well as the
often challenging, even unsettling, themes under the
Instagram-friendly surface of her works. 

So how did a career that began
with guerrilla performances and protest pieces wind its way through
voluntary commitment to a psychiatric facility and crescendo in
family-friendly social-media ubiquity? Artnet News national art critic Ben Davis came
on the Art Angle to unwind the unlikely history and undeniable
resonance of Kusama’s groundbreaking practice.

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