Yoko Ono, Demonized No Longer (book review) [View all]

Original link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/23/books/review/yoko-ono-biography-david-sheff.html

David Sheff’s new biography convincingly argues for John Lennon’s widow as a feminist, activist, avant-garde artist and world-class sass.


Yoko Ono in 1967, with examples of her artworks.Credit...Watford/Mirrorpix, via Getty Images

By Alexandra Jacobs
March 23, 2025, 8:25 a.m. ET

YOKO: The Biography, by David Sheff

Here’s the thing about Yoko Ono, the artist and widow of the murdered rock star John Lennon (usually not identified in that order), and the subject of David Sheff’s new biography. She is funny — ha-ha, not peculiar.

Asked by an interviewer if she’d ever forgive Lennon’s killer Mark David Chapman, since Pope John Paul II had visited the jail of his own would-be assassin to offer absolution, Ono replied: “I’m not the pope.”

Promoting an ephemeral Museum of Modern Art “exhibit” in 1971, in part to protest the underrepresentation of women and Asian people there, she posed in front with a strategically placed shopping bag so that the building signage read “Museum of Modern (F) Art.” (This was years before “Family Guy”!)

Elton John recounted in his memoir, “Me,” how he’d wondered why Ono had sold the herd of Holstein cows she’d bought, trying to invest ethically. “All that mooing,” she told him.

FULL story: http://archive.today/SaOkS