“After her passing, I still can’t fully calm down. Yayoi Kusama left so many works of art and memories… I feel that she is here, now. She shared her entire life with us through her work. We saw her passion for art, her determination to achieve ambitious goals, her fighting spirit and bravery, her loneliness and anxiety. And her sense of humor. Above all, she shared her eternal love and soul. A single dot represented billions of love and life. And the world today is full of hundreds of dots.” The words of Takako Fujibayashi, from Yayoi Kusama’s studio, receive a great round of applause. It is the press presentation of an exhibition that was going to celebrate Kusama’s long and exceptional life at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. And now, after the artist’s dissolution into the cosmos on August 14 at the age of 97, it celebrates a visionary, a pioneer, of minimalism, radical performance, immersive installations.

I can’t lie to you: I had high hopes that a substantial change would occur in us after the eclipse, as I suspect that only a force outside our dynamics could change us as a society. But nothing happened; only the old prophecy was fulfilled…