Yayoi Kusama is 83 and back in New York, where she first moved in 1958, from provincial Japan by way of Seattle, in a quest to become the most famous possible version of herself. She succeeded for a while. Within a decade, she’d turned herself into a kind of avant-garde hippie shaman and tabloid fixture, known for painting polka dots on naked people. But the cost was high: In the early seventies, broke and broken, she moved home and into a ­Tokyo mental hospital, her reputation in New York evaporating without her here to cultivate it. By 1996, it was ­possible for a Paula Cooper ­Gallery ­intern to find one of Kusama’s chair-­sculptures, which are covered in phallic carbuncles, in a junk shop on East 11th Street. He bought it for just $250.