This week, I had the honor of experiencing two rare artistic blessings. First, I was able to meet Japanese avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama in person, in her new Tokyo museum. Then, hours later, I was banned from her personal studio. In the art world, 88-year-old Kusama is a living deity, […]
As much as she is praised for her support of oppressed communities, her understanding of such communities is sometimes disappointingly simplistic.
For example, black people make several appearances in Kusama’s 2002 autobiography as exotic or primitive beings. She breathlessly marvels at “[black people’s] distinctive smell” and “animalistic sex techniques.” She recalls using a naked black man in her own performance art, apparently for visual effect, describing his lips and genitals in detail. She also laments that the area in Greenwich Village where she used to live has turned into a “slum,” where real estate prices are “falling by $5 a day” because “black people are shooting each other out front” (this sentence is only in her original Japanese text – it was deleted from the English translation, curiously). And though her work as a poet and novelist is less known than her visual work, these stereotypical themes also appear in her short story “The Hustler’s Grotto of Christopher Street,” which features a young black male prostitute who is an impulsive drug addict.
Overall, it’s a pattern that reflects an uncritical and unimaginative acceptance of mainstream American racism, and also leaves me wondering if my own blackness might have played some small role in Kusama’s assumption that I did not understand her art and was thus unfit to interview her.
Yayoi Kusama is antiblack racist trash so all the more reason to not support her and go to her hard-to-see exhibits
The problem with Capricorn dominant or Saturn dominant people is that from young age they are raised with the idea that the only way to deal with emotions is by suppressing them, which ofc causes more pain and suffering for them. If you have been doing this, please learn to outgrow this bad habit and take as much time as you need to overcome it. Your emotions are valid, you have emotions and they are important to be respected and felt. Please don’t shut the emotional part of you, let it flow.
I would imagine that you have a decent number of sort of Middle American fans for whom Trump’s inauguration and administration is not problematic. How do you negotiate expressing your own honest feelings about these things and do you think about whether or not it’s gonna piss them off?
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