Yayoi Kusama may have her detractors, but the purveyor of polka dots has proved yet again that she’s a commercial powerhouse. According to a report released last week from insurer Hiscox, the 95-year-old was the highest-grossing contemporary artist last year.
Sales from Kusama’s auctioned works totaled $80.9 million in 2023, moving her up from the second-highest selling artist in 2022. She switches places with David Hockney, whose auctioned sales totaled $50.3 million last year.
The Hiscox Artist Top 100 report only considers the sales of works that were created after 2000 and sold at auction at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips between 2019 and 2023 for its trends analysis. So artists such as Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet and Jean-Michel Basquiat, who regularly rank as top selling artists elsewhere, do not appear in the list.