The Art of Madness and the Madness of the Market
Yayoi Kusama: The woman the West first struggled to accommodate, then celebrated — and finally turned her difference into a global brand
27/08/2026
It began with flowers.
Yayoi Kusama was born on March 22, 1929, in Matsumoto, Japan, the youngest of four children in a prosperous family involved in the seed business and plant nurseries. She grew up among plants, greenhouses and fields. At around the age of ten, she began painting obsessively.
But flowers were not simply flowers to Kusama.
They spoke to her.
Surfaces began multiplying before her eyes. Patterns covered walls, ceilings, objects, even her own body. She saw fields of light, dots and endless nets. The hallucinations that would accompany her throughout her life did not remain outside her art.
They became her art.
And that is where the story of Kusama begins, but also the story of an art world that would spend decades trying to decide what to do with a woman who fit nowhere.
The child who painted what she saw
Kusama's family did not welcome her artistic ambitions. Her mother opposed her painting and, according to Kusama's later accounts, destroyed some of her works. Her family life was troubled, and her parents' marriage was deeply unhappy.
Painting, however, had already become a means of survival.
She was not painting to reproduce the world.
She was painting in order to survive the world she could see.
The dots, nets and obsessive repetitions — the sense that a single visual unit could multiply until it swallowed an entire surface — were not yet the instantly recognizable “Kusama style.”
They were a defence mechanism.
Later, she would call the process “self-obliteration.”
The irony is almost perfect.
The woman who tried to erase the self through art would eventually create one of the most recognizable artistic identities on earth.
New York: the avant-garde was not quite as progressive as it thought
In 1957, Kusama left Japan for the United States. She arrived in New York determined to become an artist and quickly began producing work unlike much of what surrounded her.
Her vast nets, soft sculptures, mirrors and installations were radical. During the 1960s and early 1970s she became an active part of New York's avant-garde, experimenting with happenings, body painting, fashion, film and anti-war performances. Her own official biography describes the period as an expansion of the boundaries of artistic practice.
But there was a small problem with the avant-garde:
it was avant-garde mostly when the right people were doing it.
Kusama was a woman, Japanese, an immigrant and an artist who refused to stay inside the categories available to her.
She was present in the artistic revolution, but she did not receive the same position of power as many of the men who became its better-known protagonists.
Later, questions would also arise over the adoption of ideas and practices associated with her work by other artists without giving her the recognition she believed she deserved.
History has a habit of becoming much kinder to pioneers after someone else has already made their innovations profitable.
When the “strange woman” became a problem
Kusama returned to Japan in 1973. Her career had entered a difficult period, while her psychological struggles had intensified.
In 1977 she voluntarily entered a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. But she did not stop working. She established a studio nearby and continued painting, writing and producing art with extraordinary consistency.
Perhaps this is the most important part of her story.
It is not that Kusama simply “overcame her madness.”
She learned to create inside it.
For decades, the label of “madness” could easily function as a convenient way of not taking her art entirely seriously.
Because it is always easier to call a woman strange than to admit that perhaps she has seen something you have not yet learned how to see.
And then came the miracle or the marketing
Kusama's reappraisal developed gradually from the 1980s onward and exploded in the twenty-first century.
Suddenly, the woman who had once been difficult to classify became extraordinarily easy to recognize.
Red and white dots.
Pumpkins.
Mirrors.
Infinity Rooms.
Endless repetition.
Her universe became so recognizable that her name no longer even needed to be visible.
And then art met branding.
The Infinity Mirror Rooms became a global phenomenon. Her installations became experiences; experiences became photographs; photographs became social currency; and social currency became even greater commercial value.
Then came Louis Vuitton.
The auctions.
The museum queues.
Instagram.
Kusama was no longer the difficult Japanese avant-garde artist.
She was simply Kusama.
An entire visual universe that could move from a canvas to a handbag, from a museum installation to a storefront, from contemporary art to luxury advertising.
And somewhere along the way, the market performed a remarkably clever trick:
it took the difference it had once struggled to accept and turned it into a product.
From pathology to brand
This is not an argument against Kusama.
It may actually be her greatest vindication.
The market did not create Kusama.
Kusama created her universe decades before the market understood how to sell it.
What changed was the gaze.
The same dots that could once be interpreted as symptoms later became a signature.
Repetition became branding.
Self-obliteration became an immersive experience.
Psychological suffering became an aesthetic language.
And the woman who spent much of her life trying to survive her own mind became one of the most commercially successful female artists of her era. Her works reached prices in the millions, while her name became globally recognizable far beyond the traditional boundaries of the art world.
So who was actually mad?
Yayoi Kusama died on August 14, 2026, at the age of 97. News of her death was announced on August 27. She remained artistically active until the end of her life.
She left behind something far more difficult than fame.
She became recognizable without abandoning the very qualities that had made her an outsider.
The art world did not wait for her.
The market did not understand her immediately.
The West was not initially ready for a woman who was not asking simply to enter its rules, but was creating her own.
It took decades to transform the “strange” woman into a genius.
And even longer to transform the genius into a brand.
Perhaps, then, the real question is not whether Kusama was mad.
Perhaps the more uncomfortable question is:
How many artists must we call mad before the market decides they were geniuses after all?
Kusama did not have to cure her madness to become great.
The world had to learn how to look at her.
And by the time it finally did, it was too late to ignore her.
It was, however, exactly the right moment to sell her.
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