Years before the polka-dotted pumpkins, before the Instagrammable Infinity Mirror Rooms, Yayoi Kusama made art that was charged with oppositional energy. Her performances, in which she painted dots onto the naked bodies of her collaborators, were an expression of ’60s counterculture. They were protests against the Vietnam War, rebukes to the art market.
The forced excitement accompanying each new iteration of the Venice Biennale, I’ve heard it said, is akin to a faked orgasm—at some point, it’s probably better to stop. Yet among this magical city’s spells, as the novelist Mary McCarthy once wrote, is “one of peculiar potency: the power to awaken the philistine dozing in the sceptic’s breast.” McCarthy had in mind “dry, prose people” who object to “feeling what they are supposed to feel, in the presence of marvels.