The Hirshhorn Museum encourage their guests to take photos to help promote the work of Yayoi Kusama.
On February 23 2017, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. opened up its most anticipated exhibition, the Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors. Upon opening, it attracted a record-breaking crowd that seemed almost endless. It led the museum to expand its hours and accommodate its guests in ways such as allocating timed passes for visits. What is so interesting about this hyped-up exhibit is the experience that it has to offer to its guests. People has described the exhibition as not only “psychedelic” and kaleideoscopic,” but also “Instagrammable.” This lead me to wonder how museums in today’s society are changing their business models to become more flexible for their visitors in order to rack up in revenue; visitors who would brave hours of waiting and ridiculously long lines just for a quick 30 second viewing — enough time for a quick selfie.
Since Instagram has begun to develop itself as a way for artists to exhibit their art and has become a sort of virtual art gallery, I began to wonder how that would affect institutions like art museums and how they would react to this shift. For the Hirshhorn Museum, they have embraced this change and are creatively using it to their advantages to gain more revenue and popularity. They enable the guests to not only interact with the gallery, but also unconsciously help promote their exhibition. It seems like a classical pyramid scheme where a guest would take a photo of a room and post it on Instagram, which in turn catches the eye of some of their followers who would also be interested in visiting the museum. But this creative strategy works and will continue to help promote Yayoi Kusama’s art. With Instagram’s ability to quickly share photos and videos to the world, the public quickly caught sight of Kusama’s colorful world that is filled with lights and patterns and her popularity has risen tremendously.
As a way for the museum to fix the problem of long stagnant lines of guests, viewing is limited to only 30-seconds. This leads to the viewers in wanting to experience more of this profound environment that provokes the mind and one’s internal reflection. I first heard about the exhibition when I started to see Instagram photos of my friends in these crazy yet interesting rooms. It caught my interest and I started to look at tags related to the Hirshhorn Museum and Yaoi Kusama. But Instagram provides only a small window for the viewers, not enough to satisfy my curiosity. I can relate this back to the field note-taking workshop that we had to go through. To be physically there in an environment is a whole new experience and offers much more than seeing it through a screen. With Spring Break in effect, I plan on visiting the Hirshhorn Museum and witness for myself the outrageously long lines that I must endure in order to witness a new world and observe the creative ways that the museum have done to make this exhibit a success not only for themselves but also for Yayoi Kusama.
