MIRROR MIRROR ON THE WALL . . .
Who’s the hottest ticket of all? Octogenarian Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama sets AGO sales on fire
“It feels like we’ve been selling tickets for an Adele concert. We’ve never experienced anything like this before.” LISA CLEMENTS AGO’S COMMUNICATIONS CHIEF ON THE RESPONSE TO UPCOMING EXHIBITION BY YAYOI KUSAMA, LEFT
Around 3 a.m. Wednesday, Debbie Weber’s number finally came up: After 13 hours of waiting, it was her chance to secure two tickets to the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Yayoi Kusama exhibition, which opens in March.
Had she been conscious to see it, she might have claimed them, too. “Of course, I was fast asleep,” she said, “so I went right to the back of the line.”
Later that morning she finally secured tickets for the exhibition, a touring career survey of the octogenarian Japanese artist. By then, though, her frustration still outweighed her relief.
“Why did I have to go through that?” said Weber, who first logged in to the gallery’s online ticketing system at 2 p.m. on Tuesday.
“Usually, to get your members’ pass, you just go online and book a ticket — very relaxed, very normal. But this was frantic. It felt like mass hysteria marketing.”
The AGO’s system comfortably handles about 1,500 ticket sales an hour, which has always been more than sufficient.
On Tuesday, the first day of its members-only ticket reservations, online queues went from zero to 10,000 people at the opening gun, peaking at 18,000 not long after.
“It feels like we’ve been selling tickets for an Adele concert,” said Lisa Clements, the AGO’s chief of communications and brand.
“We’ve never experienced anything like this before.”
Hundreds came to the AGO’s Facebook page to complain: “9.5 hours later and still no tickets!” user Heidi Ash wrote. “Was this a publicity stunt to generate hype? Because all it is doing is creating frustration and anger with loyal members!”
Throughout the thread, the AGO apologized, counselled, guided and soothed. The entire experience, Clements said, has been a crash course in unheard-of art-world popularity. “There’s a lot of learning as we go,” she said, “because really, this is unprecedented.”
Who is Kusama, and why is she such a draw? At 88, despite her longstanding art-world presence, the artist seems really to be just entering her prime. With an oeuvre of painting and sculpture best described as candy-coloured fantasia, Kusama’s alluring, friendly work has helped make her an Instagram superstar.
Her most popular works, especially online, have been her Infinity Rooms — mirrored isolation chambers that use light, colour and reflection to cre- ate the illusion of the limitless.
Because of the nature of the spaces, a maximum of only four people will be able to enter each one, and then, for only 30 seconds at a time. That means after the lineups, more lineups, as viewers wait to enter each of the six Infinity Rooms in the show.
It all amounts to a perfect storm: unprecedented demand running headlong into the scarcest of time.
Clements said the AGO has been preparing ticket buyers, and itself, for the Kusama onslaught for at least a year. “We’ve gone to every venue to see how they’ve managed lineups, and we’ve looked at what they’ve done to keep people engaged while they’re waiting,” she said. “We obviously want to maximize the viewer experience, but no question, it’s challenging.”
The exhibition, called Infinity Mirrors, has been touring the U.S., from the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., to the Seattle Art Museum to the Broad Museum in Los Angeles, where it is currently on view.
In each venue, Clements said, the AGO looked closely at how to handle the overwhelming interest.
“At the Hirshhorn, we saw tickets sell out in two days, and we thought, ‘We can’t do that,’ ” she said. The AGO settled on staggered releases (there will be another member buy- ing window in January before tickets are released to the general public) to mitigate the frenzy. But there’s only so much they can do. Member and general tickets are each capped at about 30,000. It adds up to a lot of hopefuls sure to be left in the cold.
“We tried to prepare people,” Clements said. “But we’ve had to have a lot of conversations that, yes, not everyone who wants to come will be able to.”
At around 60,000 slots, the show will be among the smallest blockbuster exhibitions, numbers-wise, that the museum has ever hosted, despite it being the largest footprint it has ever devoted to a living artist. (By comparison, the travelling survey of famed Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei drew more than 145,000 people for the gallery in 2013.)
“For us, it’s a matter of measuring success by something other than numbers of tickets sold,” Clements said. “Really, everything about this show is different. It’s really exciting, but it’s going to be an intense few months.”
For Weber, some quick math told the same tale. “All together, I waited 14 hours online for three minutes in those rooms,” she laughed.
“It’s a bit ridiculous, isn’t it? I’m not trying to see a Neil Young concert. I’m a member of the AGO.”