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The Financial Times: Yoko Ono talks to Simon Schama
She is 79 and still producing the kind of conceptual art that made her infamous in the Sixties. But had she not been Mrs John Lennon, would the world have heard of Yoko Ono? The answer, says Simon Schama, is YES.

“Long before she ran into Lennon, Ono had established herself as a multi-media innovator – a pioneer who anticipated all kinds of performance and conceptual art pieces which, every so often, achieve a kind of poetic essentialism that is genuinely eye-popping and often moving. You can capture some of this radically adventurous innocence in her films, the best of which will be included in the Serpentine show: ‘Cut Piece’ from 1964, where she sits impassively on stage while audience members shear away pieces of her clothing – at first with nervous self-consciousness and then with cumulatively uninhibited ferocity.”

Author: Simon Schama / Photography: Yoko Ono and John Lennon by David Bailey, 1971 / @FinancialTimes