The National Gallery of Victoria’s Yayoi Kusama has become the best attended ticketed art exhibition in Australian history, with “easily more than half a million people” visiting the 96-year-old Japanese artist’s show in four months.
On Monday the Victorian premier, Jacinta Allan, announced the milestone by saying that the NGV’s exhibition had “brought five MCGs worth of visitors to the heart of Melbourne” – or more than 480,000 people since it opened in December; about 40% were from interstate or overseas. This smashes a record the NGV set in 2017 with its exhibition Van Gogh and the Seasons – which was visited by 462,262 people.
But the curator of Yayoi Kusama, Wayne Crothers, the NGV’s senior curator of Asian art, tells the Guardian that that figure will “easily” surpass 500,000 by the time it ends on 21 April; in the show’s final days, the NGV is extending its opening hours to midnight so any stragglers – or repeat fans – can see it before it shuts.
“We were thinking, will it get to 500,000, maybe just? But we know now it will well surpass that,” Crothers says.
Why has Yayoi Kusama been such a huge success – even amid a cost-of-living crisis, when people are pickier than ever about what art they’ll pay for? Kusama is among the world’s most famous living artists, and is indisputably the world’s top-selling female artist – so part of it is down to her reputation. But undeniably some of the interest in the exhibition stems from the sheer visual appeal of Kusama’s colourful, often deceptively cheerful-looking work; ever since the NGV exhibition opened, children have been drawn to her giant “dancing pumpkin” in the gallery’s foyer (which will have a permanent home at the NGV once the show ends) and the multiple rooms filled with spotty, inflatable noodles.
“I have observed and overheard a lot of people say they are not usually gallery visitors, but they came because of the interest it was inspiring in people they knew,” Crothers says.
Even with her dark inspirations – oblivion, death, sex, war – the recurring symbols Kusama uses, such as flowers, polka dots and pumpkins, are irresistible to children, which means she can draw in families. Her incredibly selfie-friendly body of work also attracts young people who may bring their friends – and sometimes even return with their parents. (Even Dua Lipa couldn’t resist a selfie while in town.)
“Traditionally it has worked the other way – the older generations often bring in the young people who are less likely to regularly go to galleries. We’ve seen the opposite here,” says Crothers. “Then the people who found it emotional and special have come back for second visits. Some people thought, ‘Oh the grandkids will love this’, and came back with them. So there has been a snowballing effect, which has brought us an audience which is very different from our norm – that is a great thing.”
And then there are Kusama’s kaleidoscopic “infinity rooms”, mirror-lined spaces that use reflections of light to evoke a dizzying sense of the cosmic. These are perhaps what she is now most famous for, in the Instagram era; the NGV had to introduce a queueing system and a brisk 30 to 40 second time limit to manage the huge public appetite, with each room also having its own gallery attendant to explain the rules and move people along. There is a way to get longer inside a Kusama infinity room: one couple held their wedding at the NGV and had their photos taken inside one.
Some art critics have been a bit sniffy about Kusama’s mass appeal – the New York Times once wrote that her “sometimes blandly decorative installations” were “the art world’s equivalent of Star Wars premieres”. But what is the point of being a snob when she can bring in crowds bigger than this year’s Formula One Grand Prix? (That’s 405,000 tickets, if you’re wondering.)
“When the first impressionist show opened in 1870, art buffs were snobbish about it being commercial and for the common masses,” Crothers says. “But innovation is not really understood by the mainstream of the moment. People are critical of new things they don’t want to understand. The criticism of the pop artists in the 1970s – people said, ‘this isn’t art’. It’s repeated all through history, and probably denotes something as pushing the boundaries.”
“It’s a compliment!” he adds. “If people say, ‘I think it’s just crass populism’ – why shouldn’t art be enjoyed by the general masses?”
