Open Culture: “Yayoi Kusama turned 93 this past Tuesday, and she remains not just artistically productive but globally beloved. Her work itself continues to appeal to an ever wider range of viewers of all nationalities and ages. “Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist who is sometimes called ‘the princess of polka dots’,” says the brief introduction to her life and work offered at Take Kids. “Although she makes lots of different types of art – paintings, sculptures, performances and installations – they have one thing in common, DOTS!” That’s certainly one way of describing her, though anyone who’s followed her 70-year-long career will notice the conspicuous absence of other, equally important elements of her art’s development: mental illness, for instance… Yet even the new video essay on Kusama from Great Art Explained, a Youtube channel very much pitched to an adult viewership, takes as its focus the artist’s relationship with variously sized two-dimensional solid circles. At the age of ten, says the channel’s creator James Payne, she “had her first hallucination, which she described as flashes of light, auras, or dense fields of dots. The dots would come to life and consume her and she would find herself obliterated.” Since then, and though her art has “crossed from art to fashion and from filmmaking to performance art, her continuing exploration of the polka dot has remained the one consistent motif.”