The Immersive Art Experience: Are Attractions Considered Art?
When the Tate Modern opened its 2012 Yayoi Kusama retrospective, the curators probably knew it would be big. It was, after all, the first major European survey of a ground-breaking conceptual artist. What they couldn’t have predicted was the global frenzy that one of the works — “Infinity Room,” a barbershop of mirrors infinitely lit with fairy lights — would ignite. Nearly a decade later, Katy Wan, the curator behind Kusama’s two new iterations of “Infinity Room” opening at the British Museum this summer, admits that the revival exhibitions’ purpose is twofold: to provide access to visitors chomping at the bit to experience the artist’s now widely-snapped installations for themselves as well as provide a moment of pause to “reassess Kusama in light of her rise to global acclaim, helped in recent years by the rise of social media."
It was, however, the ubiquity of social media that brought the Museum of Modern Art’s 2013 iteration of artists Hannes Koch and Florian Ortkrass’s “Rain Room” to the attention of masses. Who could miss supermodel Karlie Kloss strategically backlit in a white skirt? Her caption of choice documenting her visit: “no umbrella needed #RainRoom.” Of course, the only place one might have wanted one was in the queue that wound around the block for weeks. Surely Karlie didn’t have to wait like the rest of us.
It's impossible to deny that interactivity has always been foundational to art spaces and their success.
It’s true. Digging into the history of art spaces, it’s impossible to mark when they became experiential. The Louvre, for example, first let people roam its halls when artists were still in residence working on canvases that draped from floor to ceiling. MoMA’s founding director Alfred H. Barr Jr. famously hosted “Joe Milone’s Shoe Shine Stand” in the building’s lobby in 1942, offering museum-goers a chance to get their own shoes polished in the bejeweled throne of Sicilian immigrant Joe Milone. (Eventually, Barr was thrown out by the board for being too avant-garde.) Even if the relationship was not recognized in real-time, it’s impossible to deny that interactivity has always been foundational to art spaces and their success. Perhaps this means social media’s current dominance in conversations is only a phase — a growing pain that will soon collapse into our understanding of these institutions. If the past is any indication, artists will have to lead the way.