Do exhibitions matter now unless you can take a good selfie in it or turn it into social media content?

The elitist part of me enjoyed what happened to art after it became detached from mastery over physical media. It gave art the scope to become purely about intellect, concept and story. Of course this meant that instead of being able to just marvel at a work’s virtuosity, audiences often spent more time reading the accompanying curator notes to try and understand what they were looking at. Over time, it felt like the sector forgot that art could ever be anything but oblique and alienating. For us bookish, introverted types, maybe we enjoyed the shift to quiet and sterile white cube galleries, away from the dirty masses.

Going to this Kusama exhibition was the opposite of that. It was incredibly busy and full of conceptual contradiction and irony. For many of the experiences, you had to line up like you were in the queue for a fairground ride. In rooms where you were jostling with other patrons, I imagined that this was how nineteenth century salons were like, when people would flock to see new and sensational paintings.

While it’s great that art should be so popular, I’m used to being able to take my time at an exhibition. Here, guides would regularly and sternly tell you that your allocated time was up and tell you to move on. They would carefully count out and meter out each group’s time with a Kusama room. It’s all understandably necessary, but after a while, I wondered if the administration of the exhibition was more interesting than the actual artwork – case point, seeing a sign that read “‘Chandelier of Grief’. Enter queue here” complete with dreary patrons in background.

This meta aspect of the exhibition happens as soon as you enter the NGV with Kusama’s work,“Narcissus Garden”, a field of hundreds of shiny silver balls in clusters on the ground. A wall caption says that Kusama initially made and sold the work, ball-by-ball, by gate crashing the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966. It was a comment on vanity that doubled as astute self-promotion. However, these days we don’t need a silver ball to dwell on our reflections, we have our phones instead. Everyone here was queuing for a moment for a selfie and the artwork is just a background. This of course isn’t Kusama’s or the NGV’s fault. It’s just sad that art has been reduced to a novel gimmick.