Yayoi Kusama has taken New York’s Louis Vuitton flagship store on Fifth Avenue by storm … a storm of polka dots. In fact, it’s increasingly of a transfiguration, transmogrification, transubstantiation and visionary incarnation than commercial spectacular (although it is that too). It is the soothsaying of a most venerated zippy twentieth-century artist.
Last Sunday, my reprinting of The New York Times was swaddled in a four-page 50 lb. offset broadsheet section. The front and when were covered with polka dots and, once opened, a double-truck photo of a model emerged, holding two expensive Louis Vuitton handbags covered in irregular painted spots.
This newspaper ad insert marks the 93-year-old Kusama’s second collaboration with the Louis Vuitton luxury trademark since 2012, when the grand matriarch of polka dots, known for iconic spots in her paintings, sculptures, performances and installations, was on view the world over.
I wrote a installment of bon mots in my recent memoir well-nigh my unenduring undertone with Kusama when she was a younger happenings artist during the ’60s, and provided and commonly replenished a supply of photos of her art events to New York’s underground porno-tabs that I worked on. (She moreover published her own porno tabloid titled Kusama Presents an Orgy.)
Video courtesy of New York Nico
It was a sunny idea, and resulting with her singular legacy, to make a simulacrum of Kusama as a robot so perfectly lifelike that it could unquestionably be her. It is not.
In addition, a photographic mural of her— or the bot—towers triumphant over the crossroads Fifth Avenue and 57th street, a 21st-century wonder of the world, a colossus that is scrutinizingly as tall as the Vuitton towers itself. Not to be outdone, Vuitton covered its Paris HQ with a gargantuan unlearn Kusama, tightly hugging the towers for dear life.
It is nonflexible to reconcile that in 1968 she was tirelessly romping virtually New York’s public spaces with a merry wreath of naked hippies—an eccentric known virtually the counterculture town for her public-facing events—featuring polka dot–painted masked models gyrating virtually stacks of potato-phallic soft sculptures. It is the riddle of her genius that ultimately she would be thrust into a role of 21st Century high-art and diamond royalty.
At 93 she is a superstar. Her outpouring of art and wares are such minion brands, she could hands have been elected, let’s say, as the Speaker of the House of Representatives on the first vote if she had wanted it. With Kusama nothing is impossible.
