“Blacks were still discriminated against in mainstream society,” she wrote in her memoir, much of which is set in New York in the 1960s, “but the tendency to prize them as sexual playthings was taking root.” True, in the original Japanese version there’s a line in which another character tells her about Black people shooting one another outside a building where she used to live. But the real issue isn’t criminality; it’s sexuality. A lot of the book is about the orgies and antiwar “naked happenings” she staged, and she was intrigued by Black people as objects of desire, unabashedly exoticizing and eroticizing them.
And so, in the dramatis personae of one of her plays, the savage Black character is the one person who offers the heroine “the possibility of love.” But perhaps the main exhibit in the case against Kusama is a wild and surreal novella she published from the 1980s centered on a recent N.Y.U. grad named Henry who, struggling with addiction, falls into the clutches of a Chinese woman, Yanni, and the escort service she runs for a rich gay clientele. Yanni, who has sympathy for Henry as a Black man “in a racist country,” is moved by his “dazzling beauty,” although he inverts, rather than embodies, the usual tropes of Black virility. The narrative’s only white character is the client he is meant to submit to, a businessman who is too smitten and self-involved to realize that Henry, who is straight, perceives him as a nightmarish “looming white mass of meat.” The story turns on the fatal encounter between them.
How to interpret this phantasmagoria? “Different readers make different readings,” as the scholar Kobena Mercer observed, in an influential essay that — discussing Jean Genet, Robert Mapplethorpe and Rotimi Fani-Kayode — interrogated “racial fetishism” as a catchall dismissal. You could decide that the characterization of Henry is anti-Black, as the article you read did. But why stop there? Yanni can be read as embodying the racist trope of the “dragon lady,” and you can find Jewish as well as gay stereotypes here too — though maybe she’s sending them up, not enlisting them? Ryu Murakami has said the work put him in mind of Genet; others may be reminded of certain works by Samuel R. Delany. You might reach another conclusion. When you’re entering the marshlands of race and desire, you shouldn’t rely on a journalistic distillation of someone’s writings, in this column or elsewhere.
Even if you remain convinced that showing this art is an offense to be expiated via compensation, you’ll want to take care not to mistake revenue for profits. Doubtless one reason museums have shows by big-name artists is that lots of people want to see them and lots of tickets can be sold. But at nonprofits like the SFMOMA, operating costs far exceed ticket sales, which is why they depend on donations.
What’s certainly true is that if museums are providing an artist’s life story, as they often do with major shows, it shouldn’t be sanitized. That doesn’t mean we should rush to cordon off Kusama’s work with disavowals and warnings. (SFMOMA now has an online “Note to Our Community” about “harmful language describing Black people” and about Kusama’s apology.) This is an artist who once declared she wanted to castrate Japanese men and send them into exile — and who published another novella about necrophilia. It’s best not to take life lessons from her erotic imagination. But we probably shouldn’t try to police it either.