ARTIFACTS: A dispatch from the Infinity Mirrors exhibition at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C.

I’ve been away in Washington, D.C. for a week (see story), so I’m not up on what’s going down in Monterey County. But I did manage to get into D.C.’s Hirshhorn Museum for the much-hyped retrospective exhibit Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors. Here are some observations.

Nothing inflates hype quite like scarcity. And the free passes to get into Infinity Mirrors, starring six of the Japanese artist’s renowned Infinity Mirror Rooms, have been getting snatched up within seconds of their online release. People have been flipping the passes, selling them online for up to $25 each. One D.C. resident managed to get passes, but her assigned date and time coincided with the city’s sudden winter snowstorm, and she and her family endured 90 minutes of waiting in line outside the museum before they threw in the towel. Or passes.

The first Kusama piece that viewers encounter is a row boat made of purple phalluses, which looks menacing, organic and funny, and would have given Sigmund Freud a seizure.

The Infinity Mirror Rooms are smallish from the outside, the size of large sheds. Each one is manned by a museum worker who instructs you on how long you have to spend inside each room (they have stopwatches). The door closes, and whatever is in there gets multiplied endlessly, like a mirrored elevator. Or, like my wife said, one of those Indian restaurants on New York’s Lower East Side that are as slight as alleyways but use mirrors to look bigger. One of the mirrored rooms contains oddly shaped, bulbous white phalluses with red polka dots, like cartoons characters from a Japanese anime. Step in there and it looks like you are surrounded by hordes of them.

Another room just has a window that you stick your head through. Blinking and changing carnival lights give the illusion that your head is floating through Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey “Star Gate” scene. Very cool.

The most arresting room might be the one with colored light bulbs hanging from the ceiling, which gives the most disorienting feeling of being suspended in space, which is the effect that it seems most people want – to feel like they are in another world. Kusama uses your own eyes and senses, darkness and light, to do that. So in that way it’s a transporting experience. But to where? If it’s more of a funhouse mirror for adults, it was definitely fun. If it’s charged with justifying the incredible hype, that may be an illusion that no art show can pull off. But maybe that’s the neatest feat there.