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# What the Art World Doesn't Want You to Know About Yayoi Kusama
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/what-the-art-world-doesnt-want-you-to-know-about-yayoi-kusama/
- Published: 2023-06-01T19:27:13.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-21T21:33:02.000Z
- Description: A new publication tries hard to reinvent Kusama as a champion of racial equity despite her troubling record of anti-Black statements.
- Author: Dexter Thomas
- Tags: Books, Opinion, Editor's Picks, Featured, Yayoi Kusama, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-large, #Import 2025-11-24 09:29 (2023, 2024, part 1)

I've had a question about Yayoi Kusama's work for a long time and the new survey publication [*Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now*](https://bookshop.org/a/539/9780500025857?ref=hyperallergic.com)(2023) has finally resolved it.

In short, the answer is money, but I’ll back up a bit. 

The volume features a roundtable discussion between notable curators and museum directors, and quickly, the topic of Kusama’s marketability comes up. The argument presented is that the mass production of Kusama merchandise — Kusama coffee cups, Kusama figurine keychains, and so on — has accelerated the democratization of art. 

*“*We couldn't have invented a better artist to be a kind of banner artist for the transnational and the transhistorical, and for improving gender balance,” Tate Modern Director Frances Morris says in the featured roundtable.

That is, the [commercialization of Kusama herself](https://hyperallergic.com/the-objectification-of-yayoi-kusama-louis-vuitton/) is not presented as a “necessary evil,” but instead as an opportunity for a positive step toward equality. This is an interesting framing that I generally agree with.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2023/06/img_5089.jpg)

Yayoi Kusama figure in front of Louis Vuitton's Paris headquarters (photo courtesy Lisa Siraganian)

But what is left unsaid is that *1945 to Now* is itself part of an attempt to “invent a better artist” — a version of Yayoi Kusama who used her art to aid in racial solidarity.

This “Kusama” does not exist. In a [2017 article](https://www.vice.com/en/article/ywnqxx/japans-most-famous-avant-garde-artist-banned-us-from-her-studio?ref=hyperallergic.com) for *Vice News,* I pointed out that in her autobiography *Infinity Net*, originally published in 2002, Kusama consistently wrote about Black people as primitive, hyper-sexualized beings. But the part that most confused me was a blank space on the page.

In her original Japanese edition, Kusama refers to the area in New York where she used to live transforming into a “slum,” with real estate prices “falling by $5 a day.” She attributes this to “black people shooting each other out front, and homeless people sleeping there.”

When the English translation of *Infinity Net* came out in 2011, this sentence was missing. It was not a mistranslation. The rest of the paragraph was intact; only the sentence about Black and unhoused people was deleted.

At the time, I was unsure what to make of this omission. However, after reading *1945 to Now*, I’m starting to think that this was an early sign of a strategy to subtly sanitize Kusama for Western audiences, reinventing her so as to improve her marketability.

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