How not to offend an artist – Style – Kommersant
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French fashion house Louis Vuitton, together with Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, presented one of the main collections of the year. But there was room for criticism in it too – the brand was accused of exploiting the artist’s work. Public relations specialist and PR manager Polina Vasilyeva discusses whether there are any to blame here.
“If it weren’t for art, I would have committed suicide long ago” is perhaps the most quoted statement by Yayoi Kusama. The path of the Japanese artist to the cause of her life and world recognition was indeed not easy. She grew up in a family where her father cheated on her mother, and she sent the little Yayoi to follow the man and punished the girl for disobedience physically and emotionally.
A traumatic experience and difficult living conditions provoked hallucinations in Kusama, which she transferred to paper. The girl found peace in repetition, again and again depicting the same “Kusama peas”. Drawing helped Yayoi calm down, but her mother did not approve of her passion for creativity, tore her work and forbade her to associate life with art.
The artist, realizing that she would not be able to develop in the right direction in Japan, at the age of twenty-seven broke off relations with her family and went to conquer America. During the “American period” Kusama presented many amazing works, but did not achieve the desired success. A series of failures, the death of her father and partner, and a lack of money forced her to return to Japan. Then the artist’s mental health also deteriorated: after a suicide attempt, she voluntarily settled in a psychiatric clinic, where she continued to paint and still lives. In the late 1980s, the art community again drew attention to the work of the artist, and she was finally able to achieve worldwide recognition. Kusama’s work has been exhibited in major galleries, a museum of the artist opened in Tokyo, and in 2012 she released her first landmark collaboration with the Louis Vuitton brand.
Ten years later, Kusama again collaborates with the brand. This time, Louis Vuitton tried to make everyone talk about the project. The most famous models from Gisele Bundchen to Bella Hadid participate in advertising campaigns. In the window of the brand’s New York store, a robot in the form of Yayoi Kusama draws the famous polka dots. London’s largest department store, Harrods, has also been adorned with iconic patterns. A large-scale blogging mailing list, the cover of the Financial Times, 3D advertising – Louis Vuitton thought out the project to the smallest detail, but there were still questions about cooperation.
The day after the release, the collaboration was criticized by blogger and curator Hilde Lynn Helfenstein. In her opinion, the brand exploits the legacy of Kusama: allegedly, due to her age and mental health, she herself is not able to actively participate in the creation of the project, adequately assess the result, and in general be interested in such cooperation.
Hilde promoted the discussion with provocative social media posts and also recorded a podcast on the topic. What is behind such activity – concern for the artist or the desire to create a high-profile newsbreak – is another question. Mental illness manifests itself in different ways. Age is not a sentence. Judging someone’s ability and aspirations solely on the basis of subjective ideas about how a 93-year-old person with a mental disorder lives and thinks is a highly controversial and unethical decision.
Another claim by Helfenstein seems to be fair – in all installations and campaigns of Louis Vuitton they show an outdated appearance of Kusama. Probably, the brand used the most recognizable image of the artist, but why not present actual photos at least in the biography section? By the way, with its design, everything is also not so simple. The brand team devoted a separate paragraph to the creative path of the artist on the site, but there is not a single mention of the features of Kusama’s mental health.
The artist has repeatedly focused on the fact that she turns “her mental characteristics into art.” Behind Yayoi’s signature patterns is more than just imagination. Behind phallic objects – fear of sex, behind endless nets and peas – obsessive thoughts and hallucinations. However, there is not a word about this connection in the Louis Vuitton project. Of course, it would be wrong to define a Japanese woman only through a mental illness, but not to mention it at all is at least strange.
Yet most of the claims, from exploitation to the legitimacy of signing documents, seem not only unfounded, but also promote disturbing stereotypes. The artist is known to rely heavily on her Yayoi Kusama Studio team, especially the studio’s managing director and longtime business partner, Isao Takakura. The details of the agreement between the teams cannot be found out, so it remains only to believe that if Kusama’s interests were not taken into account, the artist and her colleagues would not remain silent.
Kusama told Tatler Asia magazine that she wanted to share her artistic philosophy with everyone in the collaboration. Whether she succeeded in doing so is debatable. But the dream of twenty-year-old Yayoi, who moved to New York, has definitely come true. Powerhouse Arts president Eric Scheiner said that when he first met Kusama in 1996, she aspired to become more famous than Picasso and Warhol. In his opinion, Louis Vuitton helped her bring her aesthetic to a wide audience. In this context, the collaboration does not seem to be an exploitation, but a mutually beneficial collaboration that cemented Kusama’s fame and brought global discussion to the brand.
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