Signs inside in this season’s hot-ticket exhibit encourage visitors, or “viewers,” as art critics still insist on calling them, to be the show. It’s a concession, common nowadays across the art world, to the fact that most people’s vanity overwhelms their interest in fine art: Museums might as well harness our self-promotional instincts by inviting the selfie-taker to add the Hirshhorn’s hashtag to her Instagram post. Because art brings us together, you see—through our smartphones.
Restless lines have encircled the doughnut-shaped Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, the Smithsonian’s contemporary art gallery, since octogenarian Yayoi Kusama’s record-breaking fifty-year retrospective opened there late last month. In the three weeks since its opening, 95,000 have stood and waited. Only a third of those actually make it inside. It’s just that crowded. And then they’ve only, reportedly, streamed past Kusama’s paintings, sculptures, and “happenings” (movies the artist, herself an early influence on Andy Warhol, made in the 1960s) in order to take pictures of themselves in the six “Infinity Mirror Rooms”—within their allotted seconds.
Mirrored halls, seen through a little square window and lantern-lit just so, superimpose the viewer’s face over an infinitely-multiplied field of Kusama’s sculptures. Elsewhere you walk along a narrow path through a little forest of yellow and black pumpkins, also in a hall of mirrors—and see yourself, without end, reflected over an endless expanse of the organic but cartoonish art objects. (This I know from looking at other people’s selfies.)
The press release for the retrospective called the mirror rooms “photogenic”—and multiple trendy takes presaged the selfie-mania. A New York Times article more recently asked “Is That Yayoi Kusama Selfie Worth The Wait?”—and ultimately conceded, “Absolutely.” They might as well market it a “communal experience,” or so the curator told PBS: A Newshour report on the viral exhibition also highlighted the prominent but little-noticed presence of a quotation from Kusama outside the exhibit hall, “Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos.” Some light curatorial trolling, perhaps?
As so often seems to be the case with conceptual art, the joke really is on us. The uneasy sense of one’s own smallness that a Kusama mirror room used to create gets happily cancelled out by a well “liked” selfie—and Kusama mirror room selfies, appropriately hashtagged, do tend to get quite a lot of “likes.”
In decades prior—Kusama’s first Infinity Mirror Rooms debuted in the 1960s and 1970s—the ephemeral and un-shared glimpse of oneself eerily reflected over and over would have certainly got the point across: that we are each very small and insignificant indeed. And the eerie lighting and polka-dotted blobs on and on in every direction, well, it would have fit the trippy times. The viewer would get lost in a dreamy otherworld of his own repeated form, rather than in the potentially destructive task of posing for the perfect photo. He would have been forced to face himself repeated unto nothing, obliterated inside Kusama’s psychedelia… I am but an infinitesimal speck, my face is but a mask—are these sculptures cute, or scary?
Art that used to force us to feel dwarfed by sublimity and aesthetic greatness or, at least, scared and alone is now, mostly, just a backdrop for cool self-portraits. Ceding this victory to the selfie simply means accepting that everything, eventually, falls victim to cultural transmutations. The fact that a selfie-taker crushed one of Kusama’s sculptures—an ankle-high black and yellow pumpkin—last month, mere days into the retrospective’s D.C. run, has quickly become a strung-along afterthought to a story about keeping up with the times, or fatalistic adaptation, depending whom you ask.
Art throwing us into contemplation of our human smallness isn’t an original Kusama concept. And a viewer’s vanity overtaking, if not physically destroying, an art object’s integrity isn’t new either. But there’s a new symbiotic balance between art appreciation and self-love in the selfie craze. The Kusama retrospective wouldn’t have “gone viral” without it, but there remains the unintended side-effect that those of us less selfie-crazed don’t need to bother. We can build, on from others’ selfies alone, what turns out to be a pretty accurate mental map of the exhibition’s insides. Mapping its outsides, checking out the exhibits exterior elements—like this Charlie-Brown-ish giant pumpkin—will require wandering around the North Capitol zone of monumental downtown D.C. But no lines.
On a cold and windy weekend afternoon recently, an equally clueless friend and I approached the by-then traditional Hirshhorn lines. Not having done our research, we wondered vaguely if they were worth waiting in. Line-standers emitted an off-putting aura of long-haul commitment. We wandered off through the Hirshhorn sculpture garden. (There, we learned from its attendant plaque that Barry Flanagan’s Thinker on a Rock—a slender bronze rabbit poised in postmodern parody of Rodin—does, in fact, predate the psycho-thriller Donnie Darko, which features an equally frightening rabbit-person. But by few enough years that the theory of recombinant conceptualization basically still applies.)
Anyway, there was a much shorter line across the street at the National Archives. Part of the reason may be that, as we would learn, viewers are discouraged from snapping a selfie with the Declaration of Independence.
