Yayoi Kusama is without question an utterly fascinating character. I am happy that she finally gained recognition for her life-long, singleminded dedication to art, even after so many rejections and shunnings (and pilfering of ideas by artists!) by people in both the US and the Japanese art worlds. I suspect that there are many other people like her who were not strong enough to continue on in the face of so much adversity, so she should be applauded as a human being as well as an artist.
That said, I think that it is pretty clear that her late recognition is a part of the unfortunate and relatively recent phenomenon of the hyper-commodification of art, with collectors and gallerists and curators all out on the hunt for artists whom they can champion so that they (the hustlers) can get rich quick, along with their clients. The completely insane prices commanded for some artists´ works (including, now, Kusama´s) while most artists starve as they await to be (in most cases never) discovered is a result of a massive quantity of wealth concentrated in the hands of a few powerbrokers who trade art in the manner of stocks and bonds. In recent decades, such persons, and their agents, have come to wield enormous power in the art world. The entire system has become corrupt as a result. Now we have con artists posing as not only art critics and art dealers, but artists as well!
Many films have dealt specifically with this new development, of collectors buying art in order to flip it for profit, so if you are interested in that topic, I recommend that you watch some of those films. I have created a list here at imdb, but it appears that they will not include a link within the text of this review.
