i've been seeing a lot of depressing art these days. above: a letter from georgia o'keeffe to yayoi kusama, on display at the tate modern. i love kusama's passion and commitment to her art - if i were half as committed to my so-called 'art' i might actually call myself a writer. but as someone once said, baking a cake once a month doesn't make you a baker so i guess i can't call myself a writer anymore/yet. the thing that made me sad about kusama's art was that it felt so obsessive and escapist. maybe most art is? maybe her need to escape japan and the various ways in which she felt repressed helped to feed her art - in fact, i'm sure it did. but can art ever replace human relationships? we're all born with holes in our hearts, and i'm not convinced art, in and of itself, can fill it. not that she didn't have meaningful human connections, but her alienation from her family and her self-admittance into a psychiatric institution kinda got me down.
the last bit of the exhibit was a blacked-out room covered - walls, floor, ceiling - in mirrors and filled with thousands of tiny little hanging bulbs that slowly changed colour. it was beautiful.
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