Kusama engineered her own media persona through self-staged spectacle and press releases

Evidence

Kusama contrived to have herself appear as a Slum Goddess in EVO’s June 15–July 1 issue. Her press release ran beneath a half-page portrait of the artist provocatively posed lying on her stomach, naked save for her high-heel shoes, her back and posterior sprinkled with her trademark polka dots: … The Dot Event is called Self Obliteration, an Audio Visual-Light Performance. Music for Kusama is invented by Joe Jones. He promises SOMETHING to create, endlessly—achieved by “self-playing music machines with no end and stop … eliminating the virtuoso …” A music bike will be driven around New York, to let the public know about the event; the bike will be parked in the lobby of the Black Gate. Kusama designed the bike flight suit. There will be a concert, with the sound of frogs, a frog quartet, Jones invented his own instruments, sitar-like, people can stay all night, sound will be endless, so are Kusama’s dots—in blue black light. She herself is One with eternity—and promises, clad in a polka-dotted body stocking, “Extermination, Emptiness, Nothingness, Infinity, Endlessness, a trip, Self-Obliteration, Self-Destruction’ and what not … but always it is the self and the endlessness, that concerns Kusama’s obsessional mind, it’s her bag … Patterns, Dots, Repeats—and Kusama, the center of dots on mattresses and baskets, endless/endless/endless. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1063

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle on the artist-as-publicist: the press release as both artwork and self-promotion, a pre-social-media influencer playbook.
• XREF: Connects to the chapter’s core ‘scene becomes a market’ thesis — self-promotion as the artist’s labor in the emerging commercialized counterculture.