Why Is Yayoi Kusama's Artwork Tapping into the Zeitgeist?

It's no secret thatYayoi Kusama’s mesmerizing mirrored Infinity Rooms, paintings, and pumpkins are popping up everywhere these days. In addition to The Broad in Los Angeles, which is presenting “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors,” packed to the brim with six stunning kaleidoscopic rooms and other works, the Dallas Museum of Art is currently showcasing the artist’s first “pumpkin mirror room.” And then there's Chelsea dealer David Zwirner, who just openeda showdedicated to her immersive Infinity Rooms, paintings, and more. All of these exhibits are drawing endless lines and groundbreaking ticket-sale figures.

But what’s drawing reams of visitors to her surface-oriented installations in such turbulent times? Is the slight octogenarian artist, whojust opened her very own museumin Tokyo, especially good at tapping into the zeitgeist—albeit unwittingly? “Once you step into an Infinity Room, you immediately encounter your own reflection, and thereby recognize your uniqueness,” says Hanna Schouwink, senior partner at David Zwirner. "While looking at your reflection, you are confronted with the concept of infinity, making you question your place in the universe."

It should also be noted that as much as Kusama is, perhaps unknowingly, tapping into the zeitgeist, she may have also in fact been the mother of the "experiential" exhibitions movement.The othersare just, in essence, riffs on her works. And while of course she doesn't own experiential art, she was one of the first artists to achieve a cult following in the Instagram age.

广泛的助理馆长莎拉阿来也看到s Kusama’s work as having a profound symbiosis with our current cultural climate. “The Infinity Mirror Rooms give visitors the experience of being both the most important thing in the room and simultaneously dispersed and not important at all,” says Loyer, nodding to social media platforms like Instagram. “Visitors can relate to this feeling of being both significant and small at the same time; it is a common feeling in today’s world,” she adds.

Oddly enough, Kusama and the late minimalist artist Donald Judd, who similarly seems to be experiencing an enormous uptick in appreciation, were close friends, even though their aesthetic could not be more dramatically different. “In 1961, when they were both doing paintings, their works were not that different. She was doing the net paintings and Don was doing curved lines on fields. For a brief period their works were more related than dissimilar," says the artist's son, Flavin Judd, curator and copresident of Judd Foundation who curated “Yayoi Kusama,” which is on view at the Foundation’s SoHo headquarters.

For those who'd rather skip the long lines—some 5,000-plus visitors queued up to see the Infinity Rooms at David Zwirner's downtown gallery this past weekend—there's always the Whitney Museum of American Art, where you can snare your very own polka-dot Kusama pumpkin pillow for a relative bargain at$300and contemplate infinity from the comfort of home.