Yayoi Kusama contemplates infinity
Big time investment, little payoff

Gourds galore, but where, O, where, is "I"? Yayoi Kusama's "All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins."

Let's see. By fiat of the artist, viewers—two or three at a time—get a big 20 to 30 seconds but no more to view each of the five little reflective interiors that anchor her traveling retrospective Yoyai Kusama: Infinity Mirrors (itinerary below). Separate queues for each, order up to you, backtrack at will. Guards armed with timers control the traffic. An official at the Seattle Art Museum, where the show continues through September 10, said to allow about an hour to see it all, but it took me better than two. Two hours on your feet for two and a half minutes with the art: what a pathetic yield.

Or is it? I think of the MoMA show The Artist Is Present in 2010, at which dozens, maybe hundreds of members of the public stood daily to lock eyes with Marina Abramović. Needless to say, only a handful reached the front of the line. Anyone who did was entitled to stay until lights out. One morning, in a scene straight out of Darwin (or Hobbes), the doors opened and I tore up the steps, thrilled to have won eleventh place in line. Ninety minutes later, I was still in eleventh place. I flagged a guard to ask how many people got lucky on a typical day. Some days, she said, the first customer stayed all day. So I cut my losses.

Yoyai Kusama: Infinity Mirrors (itinerary below). Separate queues for each, order up to you, backtrack at will. Guards armed with timers control the traffic. An official at the Seattle Art Museum, where the show continues through September 10, said to allow about an hour to see it all, but it took me better than two. Two hours on your feet for two and a half minutes with the art: what a pathetic yield. Thank goodness the exhibition checklist isn't any longer.

Wildly popular, Kusama's pièces de résistance are mirrored chambers containing little of intrinsic interest: a dense field of notionally phallic "tubers" (Phalli's Field); mounted fairy lights (Love Forever); suspended balloons, etc. (Dots Obsession—Love Transformed into Dots); hanging lights (Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity); and—ta da!, no photos allowed, guard in attendance to ensure compliance—glowing, artificial pumpkins (All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins). Polka dots abound.

Other stuff in other media: Kusama's "Life (Repetitive Vision)."

The galleries are choked with stuff in other media, but no one looks, not much. To pass the time, people watch other people. I amused myself scanning for stray polka dots, finding them on a chemise here, sheer stockings there, and on a men's ensemble consisting of white on black Bermuda shorts along with a matching short-sleeved shirt. In the transitional, unenclosed Obliteration Room, you get to stick colored dots of many sizes all over a furnished room that used to be white.

A different sort of world in a box, by Joseph Cornell.

The pumpkins, I have to say, are disarming, like an enchanted landscape from Into the Woods, the luminous crop dense on the ground, surrounded by a dense forest of the viewers' and the guard's reflections. The pinball-palace cavity of Love Forever—viewed through a pair of square apertures just the size to frame a human face—has its undeniable pizzazz. Still, for boxes that are larger on the inside than they are on the outside, packed with fantasy and enigma and suggestion, Joseph Cornell has tons more to offer. Besides, his work is so portable.

For my money, the best of Kusama's walk-in visual-echo bubbles would be The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, on permanent view at The Broad, in Los Angeles. Alone or with a partner, you float amid nervously flickering, sometimes failing, fairy lights for the comparative eternity of 60 seconds in a vast three-dimensional Cartesian grid. By some trick of optics, the void seems shallow up and down but boundless back to front and side to side. Even so, it has crossed my mind that you get the most poetic view outside the box, glimpsing slivers of what might be spiral nebulae between a jamb and the closing door. And that view requires no wait at all.

Worth a much longer look: African treasure at SAM.

Happily for any who do opt for total immersion, The Broad knows a thing or two about handling a crowd. As I recall, having joined the electronic queue, you could roam free, awaiting a ping that for the faithful comes early because the half-hearted defect. Exiting the big show at SAM, I passed through the gift shop and found postcards of wonders—wonders—it was now too late for me to study in the galleries: totems from Africa, masks from the Pacific Northwest, a sumptuous Cranach, a lordly Van Dyck, and much, much more. As an exercise in solipsism, the current blockbuster sets the bar high. Slaves to buzz, we let the artist monopolize our attention for crumbs that are tasty but still crumbs. How on earth do we justify the waste of time?

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Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors was organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C., where it ran from February 23 to May 14 of this year. The future stops on the tour are The Broad, Los Angeles (October 21 to January 1, 2018); the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (March 3-May 27, 2018); the Cleveland Museum of Art (July 9-September 30, 2018); and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (November 18 to February 17, 2019).