Kusama Is Gone. The Dots Are Forever.

My daughter was five when she fell in love with a woman in a hot pink wig. She didn’t understand the art. She didn’t need to. She just saw the polka dots and the infinite mirror rooms, and she was hooked. She dressed up as Kusama for weeks. We all took the photos. We all stood in line for the selfie.

Now Kusama Yayoi is dead, and the selfies feel different.

For decades, Kusama built her entire practice on an obsession with infinity. She painted dots that had no end. She built mirror rooms that stretched forever. She was the artist who tried to make the infinite tangible, to drown herself in a sea of her own repetition until the self dissolved. It was radical. It was a scream against the ego.

But here’s the part the obituaries won’t tell you: Infinity is only beautiful when you can’t buy it.

Look at what happened in the hours after the news broke. The museum statements. The tribute posts. The sudden, urgent scramble to confirm which pieces are in which private collections. The market is not mourning an artist. The market is pricing a limited edition.

This is the cruelest twist of Kusama’s legacy. She created a body of work that was a philosophical attack on consumerism, on the endless accumulation of stuff. And now that she’s gone, that work has become the ultimate luxury asset. The critique has been absorbed by the thing it criticized.

I remember standing in one of her Infinity Mirror Rooms, that tiny, vertigo-inducing box where you’re surrounded by a million points of light. It felt profound. It felt like you were touching the edge of something huge. And then you walked out, and there was the gift shop, selling tote bags with the same dots. The profound and the commodified were separated by a single doorway.

That was always the genius and the tragedy. Kusama didn’t fight that contradiction. She embodied it. She painted alongside Andy Warhol and was swallowed by the same machine. She fought for recognition for decades, and when she finally got it, she got it in the only way the world knows how to give it: with a price tag.

But there is a second act to this story that’s more hopeful.

My daughter is older now. She doesn’t wear the hot pink wig anymore. But when I told her the news, she didn’t ask about the auction prices. She asked if the dots would stay on the pumpkins. She asked if the mirror rooms would still be open.

That’s the part the market can’t commodify. The dots are not an asset. They are a language.

Kusama taught millions of people—including a five-year-old girl in a wig—that you can use repetition to escape yourself. That art can be a tool for survival. That you can take your worst obsession and turn it into a door that opens onto something bigger than your own pain.

In a strange way, her death makes the infinity finite. The artist is gone, so the possibility of a new masterpiece is gone. The conversation about her legacy is closed. But the conversation she started—the one about whether we can ever truly dissolve the self, or whether we’re just decorating the cage we’re trapped in—that conversation doesn’t end. It just becomes our turn to carry it.

The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam will open an exhibition this fall. She spent time in the Netherlands, met with Dutch artists, and organized events with them. The art will be there. The dots will be on the walls. The crowds will line up.

And somewhere, a new kid will see the polka dots and want to wear a hot pink wig. The artist is gone, but the invitation remains. The dots are still there, waiting for someone new to step inside.