Bernard better have my money

How much would you pay for a tiny choux pastry?
I paid £6, and didn’t even eat the thing.

These ludicrously priced ephemeral souvenirs, at the Louis Vuitton x Yayoi Kusama pop up, are designed to make visitors feel that fine art and luxury fashion are within reach.

In London, Kusama’s name is synonymous with long queues thanks to her Infinity Mirror Rooms exhibition, which has been running at Tate Modern since 2021. Compared with that nearly-always sold out public exhibition, the Harrods pop up is surprisingly accessible. Alongside the LV x YK pastry shop is a three-part experience for the proletariat to freely enjoy, including a mirror room for #artselfies. This space is heavily guided by employees in white uniforms, adding to the feeling that you’re in a museum full of precious objects, rather than a shop full of mass produced goods. The actual collection of clothing and accessories is only available to purchase in a completely different part of Harrods. There is an awareness in the space that people who will spend thousands on a gaudy bag do not want to interact with those who are there for the free art.

The main attraction to these global LV pop ups are the animatronic robots of Kusama in the window fronts. Photos and videos don’t do justice to how life-like it is when she stares into your soul. Several passersby commented that it MUST be a real person. Is it creepy that an artist whose lived in a psychiatric asylum since 1977 is being represented by an extremely lifelike robot stuck in a shop window? For sure.

The colourful dots in Kusama’s work represent the artist’s ongoing and inescapable trauma; they are her hallucinations. But, before she became the ‘princess of polka dots’ Kusama's work featured endless phalluses. Phalli's Field (1965) is one of the original Infinity Rooms, and features a continuum of dotted dildos. The proliferation of the phalluses in Kusama’s work is intended to reduce the power of the symbol.

¹

She was one of many feminist artists in the 1960’s who played with this symbolism and in doing so challenged, or even mocked, the patriarchy. How has this artist gone from making work with such a knowing critique of phallocentrism to lining the polka dot pockets on the world’s richest man?

Kusama’s principle of dilution also applies to luxury goods: the more accessible a fake Louis Vuitton wallet is, the less powerful it is as a symbol of wealth. Which, in turn, means luxury fashion brands need to reinforce their high culture status with clout from elsewhere; like the visual world of fine art. And, look, I don’t hate that Louis Vuitton is aligning itself so heavily with contemporary art. The Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris is a beautiful museum that has some amazing pieces in its collection, and the Jeff Koons Monet bags were actually lols. Bernard Arnault and the team at LVMH certainly know how to pull off incredible collaborations. The sheer amount of money that must have been spent on the Harrods pop up alone is staggering... and this is just one store of hundreds globally that have been taken over. A lot of that money will have gone directly to mechatronic engineers, visual merchandisers, 3D animators and other artists to develop and show off their own creative talent.

But, is the LV x YK collaboration art or advertising? Certainly more of the latter. I think that is true of most of Kusama’s work. Her artwork is advertising for the museums that, without her viral exhibitions, would struggle to attract visitors. And, ultimately that’s no bad thing. Even if, in my opinion, the dots are not as interesting as the dicks, it gets people engaging with art.

Yayoi Kusama, Installation view of Kusama in Infinity Mirror Room - Phalli's Field, at her solo exhibition "Floor Show" at R. Castellane Gallery, New York, 1965

Rihanna putting on Fenty make-up during the NFL half-time performance, 12 February 2023

While we’re on the marketing genius that has made the LVMH boss the richest man in the world… how good was Rihanna’s not-so-subtle product placement in the middle of her NFL half time show? The image of Rihanna and her newly-announced baby bump standing in a field of personified sperm, is visually and symbolically evocative of Kusama standing in a field of phalluses. And, at the price of a couple of choux pastries, I bet they’re selling a lot of Fenty Invisimatte today.

A giant statue of Kusama painting her hallucinated dots on the Harrods building as part of the collaboration with Louis Vuitton, which ended yesterday.

1. Mignon Nixon, ‘Posing the Phallus’, October, 92 (2000), 99–127 <https://doi.org/10.2307/779235>.