The Most Famous Unknown Artist

Yoko Ono is arguably the most famous Japanese person outside of Japan, and easily the most maligned. She’s spoken of (falsely) as the woman who broke up the Beatles—not the woman who co-wrote “Imagine.” She’s known as a woman who can’t sing—not as a woman who used years of classical music training to subvert norms on more than a dozen experimental albums. Why don’t more people know about her mischievous One Woman Show at MOMA, a performance piece staged outside the museum, without its permission, that slyly railed against its exclusion of female and Asian artists? Or about the clever all-white chess set she once sent to Reagan and Gorbachev at the height of the Cold War in 1987, simply titled Play It By Trust? “Everybody knows her name,” her Beatle husband once said, “but no one knows what she does.” Now, thanks to David Sheff’s new biography, simply titled Yoko, no one has an excuse not to know anymore: about her art, her activism, her music, and her astonishing journey from war-torn Tokyo to the avant-garde art scenes of London and New York. 

Go beyond the episode:

• David Sheff’s Yoko: A Biography
• The artist's official website
• Watch Cut Piece in its 1965 or 1966 incarnations 
• Visitors to the Kunsthaus Zürich reactivated Bag Piece, originally performed in 1966, in 2022 
• Traveling to Berlin before August 31, 2025? See Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind at Gropius Bau
• Read the original Playboy interviews that Sheff conducted with Yoko Ono and John Lennon in September 1980

Tune in every (other) week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

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