Do we like Yoko Ono?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A long record of peace, feminist and anti-gun-violence work with no harmful words found, marked down for some heavy-handed legal fights.
Yoko Ono has been making work for some seven decades, and she is the sort of artist who gets handed lifetime medals. The MacDowell Medal's 2024 announcement put her in a list with Stephen Sondheim and Toni Morrison. The judges said she had rewarded eyes, provoked thought, inspired feminists and defended migrants.
The great Ono scandal is that she broke up the Beatles. She told Interview magazine in 2013 that it felt like being accused of something she didn't do, and said she tried to turn the hostility around into love. Decades of fans blaming the woman for a band's breakup says more about them than her.
Her real legal stoushes are less romantic. She sued her former assistant Frederic Seaman, alleging he breached court orders by talking publicly about the Lennons and sharing photos he shouldn't have had. It settled in January 2021, with Seaman paying $5,000 in damages and agreeing to say nothing further about John Lennon.
On the harm test, nothing nasty turned up. In 2020 she marked the 40th anniversary of Lennon's death by tweeting a call for gun control and a tally of Americans killed by guns since. In 2016 she answered Donald Trump's election with a video built around her trademark wail. I found no specific statements on LGBTQ+ people either way, so that part of the record is thin rather than good.
The recent thing is a bit of a sour lemon. This year her lawyers told a Brittany craft brewery its lemon and ginger beer, John Lemon, infringed her trademark, and reportedly threatened a fine of up to 100,000 euros. After talks, the brewer could sell the last 5,000 or so bottles until 1 July. The same piece notes she won a 2017 case against a Hamburg bar called Yoko Mono.
There is plenty of good stuff, and it is mostly the work itself: decades of peace messaging, a feminist song catalogue, and the board of a major artists' colony praising her defence of migrants. That is a record of using a platform for other people, even if the lawyers occasionally spoil the mood.