The Ballad Of Sean Yoko

She was blamed for breaking up the Beatles, then the world mourned with her whenJohn Lennon was killed. Now, at 84, Yoko Ono is finally being recognized for her artistic legacy—with a little help from her son, Sean.

- Stephen Mooallem

SEAN LENNON is talking about his mother’s child-rearing philosophy. “She had a very sort of postmodern, post-hippie, post-feminist way of thinking,” he says of Yoko Ono. “It was very liberal, and she always treated me like an individual. She never really told me not to do anything, except get a Mohawk or a tattoo. So there were very few boundaries. She believed that kids are individuals and shouldn’t be treated like a subservient class.”

At 84, Ono—singer, artist, activist, and guardian of the legacy of her late husband (and Sean’s father), John Lennon—is enjoying a remarkable late-career reappraisal. The Ono oeuvre, once maligned as a conglomeration of unbearable neo-Dadaist pranks and unlistenable music, is now considered haute. Her conceptual-art projects—films, installations, happenings, and performance pieces, such as her 1964 work Cut Piece, in which she invited viewers to cut off swaths of her clothing with a pair of scissors—today are seen as groundbreaking. Her albums and recordings, which mostly eschewed melody and traditional song structure, are held up as revolutionary. Even her clipped aphoristic “instructions,” famously compiled in books like her seminal 1964 Grapefruit, have been heralded as presciently tweet-like. And two years ago, New York’s Museum of Modern Art explored some of Ono’s early efforts in the exhibition “One Woman Show, 1960–1971.” (Back in 1971, the only way she could get an exhibition at MoMA was to invent a fake one, along with a fake ad campaign, that she publicized in local papers featuring an image of her standing in front of the building holding an oversize “F.” The fictional show was called the “Museum of Modern [F]art.”)