More Than Dots, Mirrors, and the Market
Yayoi Kusama has died at the age of 97. With her passing, contemporary art has lost an artist whose visual language is recognized around the world—so instantly, at times, that the person behind the dots, pumpkins, and mirrored rooms, and the decades of struggle that shaped this work, can almost disappear from view.
Kusama’s dots did not begin as a marketing device. As early as the 1950s, nets and repetitive structures appeared throughout her work. After moving to New York in 1958, she developed these ideas into the large-scale Infinity Nets: paintings built on repetition, accumulation, and the dissolution of boundaries. From them emerged, in time, immersive spaces, body-centered performances, and mirrored environments.
Kusama spoke openly about the perceptions, anxieties, hallucinations, and compulsive experiences that formed part of both her daily life and her artistic practice. Beginning in 1977, she chose to live in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, while continuing to work in a studio only a short walk away. From there, she sustained her artistic practice for decades.
This aspect of her life calls for particular care. Mental illness does not “make” great art. What is remarkable, rather, is Kusama’s ability to transform difficult inner experiences into a visual language entirely her own—and to turn something profoundly personal into spaces in which millions of others could encounter their own ideas of infinity, repetition, intimacy, and dissolution.
Seen from the perspective of works held in collections and presented on loan, it is therefore especially important to return to the works themselves. Long before her late international fame, Kusama was a radical and fiercely independent figure within the international avant-garde.
That this visual language eventually became a global brand is also part of the story. Kusama’s imagery functions just as powerfully in the museum as it does in photography, social media, design, and luxury collaborations. Her art is instantly recognizable, physically immersive, and accessible without prior knowledge of art history. This combination of visual immediacy and existential depth helps explain its extraordinary appeal.
Her career also raises a broader question extending beyond Kusama herself, touching both the art market and the wider economy: What happens when a complex artistic idea becomes a globally reproducible sign? The market can bring overdue recognition and open an artist’s work to an enormous audience. At the same time, it can tempt us to equate artistic significance with visibility, price, and instant recognizability.
Kusama’s life’s work reminds us to keep these levels distinct. Behind the now nearly universal sign of the dot was not a financial product, but an artist who spent decades pursuing a deeply personal vision of the world and of infinity.
Perhaps that is precisely where her lasting value lies.