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.