HEARING YOKO ONO ALL OVER AGAIN

In recent years, Ms. Ono — the subject of “Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971,” on view at the Museum of Modern Art through Sept. 7 — has won renewed critical consideration for her artworks of the 1960s, such as “Cut Piece,” a 1964 performance in which she sat impassively while others sliced her clothes off. Her status as a musician has changed, too, though here the reassessment has been less complete.

A small but vocal fan club has rediscovered her records from the 1970s and found in “Fly” or “Sisters O Sisters” forgotten feminist anthems or anticipations of punk. Her recent fifth act as a neo-disco queen has resulted in a dozen — yes, 12 — No. 1 records on the Billboard Dance Club Chart, including “Hold Me,” and lately she’s collaborated with younger admirers like the Flaming Lips, Antony Hegarty, Lady Gaga and the Beastie Boys alumnus Adam Horovitz. Few of her new admirers, however, have paid much attention to her music before 1968, solidifying the falsehood that Ms. Ono was a fine artist who turned to music only upon her marriage to John Lennon.

On the contrary, as the curators Christophe Cherix and Klaus Biesenbach affirm in “One Woman Show,” Ms. Ono was a musician and composer from the start of her career. Many of her artistic innovations now celebrated, such as her proto-Conceptualist use of instructions and scores, have roots in the musical avant-garde of New York and Tokyo. And the artificial division of her output into an early artistic career and a later musical one has obscured the enduring connections between the two.