The Infinity Dot: From Orientalized Object to Subjective Capital in the Art of Larry Poons and Yayoi Kusama

This paper traces the semiotic transformation of the "dot" motif across the careers of Larry Poons and Yayoi Kusama. The dot's journey from formalist sign (Poons, 1960s) to branded subjective capital (Kusama, 2000s-present) maps the shift from Cold War modernism to luxury-brand globalism-the comparative arc as analytical unit. Four arguments are advanced. First, Greenbergian formalism operated as a racially and gender-exclusive signsystem, consecrating Poons's dot while Orientalizing Kusama's. Second, the 1980s-90s boom constituted a regime-shift: financial capital dissolved the field's relative autonomy, replacing Bourdieusian field logic with Baudrillardian brand logic. Third, auction data reveal a 221 per cent price premium for Kusama's "Infinity" over "Dots"-not an epistemological defect but ideological machinery in operation: the canon was made-an ideological act. Fourth, the "Infinity" premium encodes a grammar of capitalist limitlessness remaining operative; Poons's formalism is historically closed. Resisting romanticisation: Poons's "privilege of refusal" was structurally unavailable to Kusama, whose brand-path is the financialization of survival under coercive mimeticism.