For better or worse, Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors reshaped the world | CNN

Yayoi Kusama was an artist of many mediums — sculpture, painting, performance art and film — but many people will remember her for one body of work in particular: her “Infinity Mirror Rooms.” The artist, whose death at age 97 was announced this Wednesday, helped to establish a new kind of immersive art primed for the Instagram age, for better or worse. She made more than 20 variants of her mirrored chambers, which use light, sculpture and reflection to create a kind of 360-degree celestial infinity. They have traveled around the world and reached enormous popularity, forever changing the types of exhibits that are staged, and the way the public engages with them. Kusama’s “Infinity Mirror” phenomenon reached its apex between 2012 and 2018, when each installation drew record-breaking crowds that pushed museums and galleries to their limits. Queue times for the 2018 exhibition, “Yayoi Kusama: The Moving Moment When I Went To The Universe” at Victoria Miro in London would run up to eight hours, said the gallery’s president Glenn Scott Wright in a phone interview. At The Broad in Los Angeles, tickets for a 2017 show of the mirror rooms sold out almost instantly, cra