Once a high-profile fixture of the 1960s New York avant-garde, Yayoi Kusama has long since become an icon, in the sense of a visually recognizable brand. Her polka dots, her spectacular sculptures of flowers and pumpkins, and most of all her “Infinity Mirror Rooms,” which regularly draw crowds willing to wait hours for as little as one minute inside — it’s all as familiar, and as reliably perfect, as Coca-Cola. Like Coca-Cola, it also goes with anything: A recent collaboration with Louis Vuitton even included Instagram and Snapchat filters.
The downside of being a brand might be a certain predictability. But being so well known actually provides a visual thinker as adept and inventive as Kusama with a kind of head start on shocking and delighting her audience, because she can achieve so much just by tweaking our expectations. Her latest room, a 13-foot-high white cube with a fully mirrored interior titled “Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love,” is as close as pop art comes to a revelation.