Yayoi Kusama

An artist's artist and an outlier's outlier during a radical time, Yayoi Kusama has stayed the course and dreed out her wyrd all these decades. A fascinating and eye-opening memoir, as well as a minor but important addition to the pre-Stonewall LGBT literature/anthropology. Bizarre, prescient, and salient.

I love her straightforward (you might even say bold) statements about what she accomplished. No false humility here. Aside from her art fame, I wonder if she deserves more credit for shaping some of the ideas of the sixties (especially with the "happenings").

Helpful in filling in some if the biographical and contextual blanks I've had since seeing her work at SAM and watching I Love Me. Some of the essays are a bit too art-speak pretentious or get way Freudian for my taste, but that was to be expected.

Yayoi Kusama arouses controversy in the art world. The qualities which make her original and distinct are appreciated by artists, but some critics and art historians tend to regard her work as peripheral, bizarre or derivative. The problem of how Kusama relates to the modernist critical canon can be attributed in part to a valid confusion about just how to asses her art, and where to place her.

(Abstract from Alexandra Munroe)