Yayoi Kusama has taken New York’s Louis Vuitton flagship retailer on Fifth Avenue by storm … a storm of polka dots. Actually, it’s extra of a transfiguration, transmogrification, transubstantiation and visionary incarnation than business spectacular (though it’s that too). It’s the divination of a most honored lively avant-garde artist.
Final Sunday, my copy of The New York Occasions was swaddled in a four-page 50 lb. offset broadsheet part. The back and front had been lined with polka dots and, as soon as opened, a double-truck photograph of a mannequin emerged, holding two costly Louis Vuitton purses lined in irregular painted spots.
This newspaper advert insert marks the 93-year-old Kusama’s second collaboration with the Louis Vuitton luxurious model since 2012, when the grand dame of polka dots, recognized for iconic spots in her work, sculptures, performances and installations, was on view the world over.
I wrote a chapter of bon mots in my current memoir about my transient affiliation with Kusama when she was a youthful happenings artist through the ’60s, and offered and often replenished a provide of photographs of her artwork occasions to New York’s underground porno-tabs that I labored on. (She additionally printed her personal porno tabloid titled Kusama Presents an Orgy.)
Video courtesy of New York Nico
It was an excellent thought, and constant along with her singular legacy, to make a simulacrum of Kusama as a robot so completely lifelike that it may truly be her. It’s not.
As well as, a photographic mural of her— or the bot—towers triumphant over the crossroads Fifth Avenue and 57th avenue, a Twenty first-century marvel of the world, a colossus that’s nearly as tall because the Vuitton constructing itself. To not be outdone, Vuitton lined its Paris HQ with a gargantuan balloon Kusama, tightly hugging the constructing for pricey life.
It’s onerous to reconcile that in 1968 she was tirelessly romping round New York’s public areas with a merry band of bare hippies—an eccentric recognized across the counterculture city for her public-facing occasions—that includes polka dot–painted masked fashions gyrating round stacks of potato-phallic smooth sculptures. It’s the riddle of her genius that finally she can be thrust into a job of Twenty first Century high-art and design royalty.
At 93 she is a celebrity. Her outpouring of artwork and wares are such beloved manufacturers, she may simply have been elected, let’s say, because the Speaker of the Home of Representatives on the primary vote if she had needed it. With Kusama nothing is not possible.
