You’ll get to spend one minute in the artist’s newest “Infinity Mirrored Room” at David Zwirner in Chelsea. Expect dancing lights to infinity, or as far as your cameraphone allows.
The Eiffel Tower or the Great Mosque of Mecca; the new iPhone or the latest Harry Potter book; Di Fara Pizza or that bakery that made Cronuts happen a few years back. For some experiences you just have to wait — and the exhibitions of Yayoi Kusama, the 90-year-old Japanese mastermind of obsessively dotted paintings, hallucinatory pumpkins and sometimes blandly decorative installations, have become the art world’s equivalent of Star Wars premieres. Ignored for decades in New York and Tokyo, driven to madness, even plagiarized by less talented men, Ms. Kusama is enjoying a late and not unmerited surge in public visibility. (She even warrants her own balloon in this month’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, alongside Pikachu, SpongeBob and the Elf on the Shelf.) She has become a brand — a process she has enjoyed and fully participated in — and drawn tens of thousands of fans worldwide to her “Infinity Mirrored Rooms,” which produce an infinite regress of colored reflections. The David Zwirner gallery, commendably, is treating “Yayoi Kusama: Every Day I Pray for Love,” which opens Saturday and runs through Dec. 14, like any other exhibition: free to the public. (It anticipates 100,000 visitors and promises to update the public on wait times via Twitter and Instagram.) If you want to see her newest “Infinity” room in New York, subtitled “Dancing Lights That Flew Up to the Universe,” prepare to wait up to two hours, and don’t expect to stay inside longer than a minute.