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 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.

Among the top five selling artists in the Hiscox ranking, Kusama was not the only Japanese artist. Yoshitomo Nara, whose most recognizable works are illustrations of grumpy looking children, was the third-highest selling artist last year, selling $36 million at auction.

In fact, the top selling Nara work went for more than the top selling Kusama: ¡°In the Milky Lake¡± (2012) sold for $10.8 million at Sotheby¡¯s Hong Kong, while Kusama¡¯s ¡°A flower¡± (2014) sold in November at Christie¡¯s Hong Kong for $8.3 million. Hong Kong continues to maintain its importance as a market for buyers, accounting for 32% of global auction sales, up from 26% the year before. As the report notes, 80% of Kusama¡¯s auction sales in 2023 were in Hong Kong, where a major retrospective of her work ran at M+ Museum for six months through May last year.

The artist also made a media splash in 2023 with a coordinated multicity campaign for which giant likenesses (sculptures, animatronic robots and blimp-like installations) appeared in different global capitals to promote her new collaboration with Louis Vuitton.

Kusama is adept at generating buzz, and has been since the beginning of her long career. Her playful and brightly colored works lend themselves to being made into merchandise, and her infinity room installations draw long lines of people eager for selfies. Her yellow pumpkin sculpture on Naoshima, in Kagawa Prefecture, is a de facto symbol of the famous art islands.

All of these enable Kusama¡¯s works to jump out of the art gallery and into people¡¯s social media feeds, making her dizzying patterns perhaps more recognizable than her own name. Nonetheless, perhaps it is the mainstream proliferation of copies and iterations of Kusama motifs that is driving demand among people who want to own the real thing.