A contemplation on the selfie
With unprecedented demand for Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors exhibit at the AGO, our reporter gets a taste in L.A.
LOS ANGELES— The line starts early, snaking down the street.
At the Broad museum you can’t help but notice that a vast majority of the clients seem to be millennials.
In the age of Instagram, art is somehow inexplicably cool again, perhaps because every selfie needs an awesome backdrop. And there is no better panorama than at the Broad, home to Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room — The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away.
As in Los Angeles, Kusama’s upcoming Art Gallery of Ontario exhibit has been met with overwhelming shock and awe-style demand. Last weekend, I checked to see if I could get tickets for the Toronto exhibit, which opens March 3, online.
I was told, helpfully, that there were 57,474 people ahead of me. They would email me whenever it was my turn — hopefully when I wasn’t barrelling down Hwy. 401 — and I would have 10 minutes to respond.
The Star wanted to see what the fuss was about so while I was in Pasadena, Calif., for the Television Critics Association press tour I took a trip to downtown L.A., where Kusama’s landmark work is on permanent display. It is also the piece that largely put the Broad, a museum named after local developer and philanthropist Eli Broad, on the map.
The Souls of Millions is the work that most identify when they think of Kusama. That’s because it has been popularized by pop star Katy Perry and by Adele, who used images of the room for one of her performances. In a case of art literally mirroring reality, perhaps that’s why an AGO spokesperson told Star visual arts writer Murray Whyte that it was like “selling tickets for an Adele concert.”
And Hollywood being the epicentre of Los Angeles, there is a continuing echo chamber of stars who visit the artwork on VIP passes to take selfies, which makes this particular artwork even more popular.
It is the greatest cultural marketing feat of the 21st century, deserving of a case study in the Harvard Business Review: Where else do you get the phenomenon of teenagers waiting hours in line at a museum to spend less than a minute to view a work of art?
The touring exhibition arriving in Toronto has travelled to Washington, Seattle and Los Angeles. It consists of six mirrored rooms and participants get to spend anywhere from 20 to 30 seconds in each room — compared to the permanent installation in L.A. where you get a more luxurious 45 seconds to a minute, depending on the guy with the stopwatch.
The touring exhibition has broken attendance records at each stop. At the Hirshhorn in Washington, membership climbed from a tiny 150 members to 10,000 people over a three-month run. The AGO will likely also see a major spike. The next block of tickets goes on sale March 6 at 10 a.m.
At the Broad, the popularity of the permanent installation has not abated, despite the work being made in 2013, with about a visitor a minute. Toronto fans will see a version of the Broad piece, not the exact room.
Over the years, the Broad has streamlined the process to get visitors in and out more quickly. After you get past the general lineup outside, which could stretch down the block on busy days, you have to line up again inside the lobby where an attendant with an iPad will tell you the wait times.
I arrived right at 11 a.m., when the museum opens on a weekend, but was told there was a four-hour wait. The room typically sells out in the first few hours.
You don’t have to wait in line since the museum will text or email you when it’s your turn. Meanwhile, you can visit the other contemporary art exhibitions in the museum.
The Broad’s permanent collections are like a greatest hits package of modern art with Jeff Koons, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Haruki Murakami and Keith Haring all displayed prominently. Unlike perhaps the more cutting-edge Frank Gehry-designed Fondation Louis Vuitton museum in Paris, the Broad is accessible and kid-friendly, a kind of glamorous, ridicu- lously expensive Planet Hollywood where that Koons balloon dog you almost bumped into was valued at $58.4 million back in 2013.
But even with these luminaries, it is the Kusama exhibit that is the showstopper.
Kusama was born in Japan in 1929. She suffered from mental illness as a child and found solace in art. A painter, writer, sculptor and former art dealer, she voluntarily lives in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo.
Kusama has said she developed the room from “hallucinations.” She is obsessed with the concept of infinity. In that sense, the exhibit is an acid trip. But it is her acid trip and you are requested to go along for the ride.
There are 20 mirrored rooms in existence. The first room, Phalli’s Field, was created in New York in 1965: a glorious psychosexual landscape, a sea of red and white polka-dotted phalluses that remains one of the cornerstone works of experimental art. A replica of that work will be part of the AGO exhibit.
Thanks to the kindness of strangers, and a bit of badgering of the polite and knowledgeable Broad attendants, I get into the room at about the two-hour mark instead of four.
I line up in a darkly lit corridor cordoned off by a rope where an attendant at the end is letting people in and out of a mirrored door. It’s my turn. I enter the room and almost trip head first. It’s like being in a giant disco ball without the Donna Summer soundtrack.
There are a cascading multitude of LED lights bouncing off each other. But the effect is more calming than blinding. There is a sense of being unmoored and drifting in a vast galaxy.
Surprisingly for an experimental, high-tech installation, the room is made of stuff you can find at Home Depot, including wood, metal, glass mirrors, plastic and rubber.
If I had another minute perhaps I would be contemplating my infinitesimally small place in the universe. But I’m up against the clock and I haven’t got my selfie yet.
Mostly I am trying to figure out how to turn on both my smart phone and my compact camera at the same time, but I’m all thumbs. Luckily, I have been jammed into the room by a couple of foreign exchange students who came in behind me and manage to fire off a photo or two.
No one is really examining the artwork. And perhaps that’s one message Kusama is inadvertently sending. If you spend too much time taking a mirror image of yourself in a mirrored room you ultimately diminish your own reality.
In this narcissistic age it is a quandary: to really appreciate the art you have to put down your camera. But if you put down your camera, how would anyone know you were there?
With seconds ticking away, I fire away in a feverish frenzy. I didn’t wait all those hours for naught. I will have to ruminate on the concept of infinity another day.
So is the art worth the hype? The AGO exhibit will be more comprehensive, giving a fuller scope of Kusama, including her sculpture and paintings.
This is an exercise in mindfulness. If you dare, take the time to explore the universe without your phone on. Live in the moment and not for the moment, and you might be rewarded with a truly immersive glimpse into the mind of the experimental art world’s most enigmatic living artist.