Kusama gained such notoriety that by 1967 she had amassed more newspaper clippings than Andy Warhol. She was delighted by the attention. "Her raison d’être has always been in a way to take over the world," says Laura Hoptman, a senior curator at New York’s New Museum. "It wasn’t about being famous or rich; it was about spreading the good word. It was almost evangelical." But the artistic elite looked down on Kusama’s mass-culture popularity, and in 1973 she retreated to Tokyo with little money and in poor health. Although she continued to show her work in Japan, her career in the U.S. and Europe remained virtually dead throughout the’ 80s. "She lost touch due to her mental state, as well as to the parochialism of the New York art world and the remoteness of the Japanese art world then," explains Munroe.

An important exhibition organized by Munroe in 1989 in New York at the now-defunct Center for International Contemporary Arts and another one, curated by David Elliott at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England, the same year, were key to a revival of interest in Kusama, says Glenn Scott Wright, of the Victoria Miro Gallery, in London, the artist’s primary dealer in Europe. The subsequent "Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968," co-organized in 1998 by Hoptman, who was then at MoMA, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s senior curator Lynn Zelevansky, firmly established the historical significance of her early work.

Of Kusama’s oeuvre, the top dollar is commanded by the early "Infinity Net" works, like the record-setting No. 2. Robert Manley, the head of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s New York, says of that sale: "It was one of these perfect storms in the auction world where you have a work of the absolute highest quality from an incredibly rare period, the condition was impeccable, and it had a great provenance," having once been owned by Judd. Hidenori Ota, of Ota Fine Arts, Kusama’s longtime Tokyo dealer, who has worked with her since the 1980s, believes only four other examples match the record piece in scale and vintage, all of them now owned by Japanese museums. While many more smaller "Infinity Nets" exist, they, too, are hard to come by. Manley cites as evidence of this the fact that since the November auction, "we haven’t gotten a single call from someone who has a late 1950s Kusama they want to sell." Sotheby’s had no upcoming lots to report at press time either.

The series’ rarity might explain why Untitled (Infinity Net Series) — also from 1959, though much smaller than No. 2 and less well preserved — brought $1,552,000 at Sotheby’s New York in May 2007, far exceeding its estimate of $300,000 to $400,000. The winning bid, the second highest price for the artist, went even higher within 24 hours when the underbidder bought the painting from the dealer who purchased it, says Anthony Grant, a senior specialist in contemporary art at Sotheby’s: "The premium the next day was wild."

Grant notes that Kusama’s works on paper are far more common than her paintings: "There seems to be no end to the drawings — even really good examples from the 1950s." Such pieces, he says, typically fetch between $60,000 and just under $150,000 at auction, with the top price standing at $133,000, paid in November 2007 at Sotheby’s New York for the acrylic and gouache Stars (F.U.S.), 1953, which carried an estimate of $40,000 to $60,000. As for the artist’s three-dimensional pieces, their performance on the block often disappoints, according to Grant: "Sometimes people find them almost too raw." The highest price for a sculpture from her New York years is £72,500 ($147,687), fetched by the 1965 wool, pasta, paint and hanger assemblage Golden Macaroni Jacket at Sotheby’s London in October 2007.

According to her dealers, the secondary market for Kusama’s older work keeps pace with her auction prices. At press time the San Francisco dealer Anthony Meier had an early gouache on paper, Nets Flower no. Q121, 1953/1964, priced at $100,000, and the Barbara Mathes Gallery, in New York, had a vibrantly colored untitled oil from 1967, priced in the mid six figures. When asked who is purchasing her work, Meier says "the profile is as varied as [for] any [artist]," adding that, "more to the point, many of Kusama’s buyers have her contemporaries in their collections but have lacked her presence until recently."