#art

There's a particular thrill when you first encounter a piece of art that speaks a language you didn't know you needed to hear. That happened to me with Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms—those kaleidoscopic chambers where polka dots multiply into eternity, where reflections fragment your sense of self into a thousand shimmering possibilities.

Kusama has spent decades exploring patterns, repetition, and obliteration through her art. What began as a way to process her own psychological experiences has become a visual language that millions now recognize: those obsessive polka dots, the pumpkin sculptures, the endless nets that transform walls and canvases into hypnotic rhythmic surfaces. Standing inside one of her mirror rooms feels like inhabiting a waking dream, suspended between presence and dissolution.

The genius isn't just in the technical execution—those carefully positioned LED lights, the precision engineering of the mirrors—but in how the work transforms you from passive observer into active participant. You become part of the artwork. Your reflection multiplies and disperses. You're both there and not there, singular and infinite. It's disorienting and liberating all at once.

Standing in front of Rothko's "No. 61 (Rust and Blue)" at the MoMA, I watched a woman cry. Not subtle, dignified museum tears—full, body-shaking sobs. The security guard didn't move. This happens here.

Mark Rothko painted this in 1953, during what critics call his "classic period," when he'd fully committed to those massive, floating rectangles of color. It's nearly eight feet tall, and the rust-orange bleeds into deep blue like a wound closing, or opening—I still can't decide which. The edges aren't clean. Nothing about it is clean.

People say abstract expressionism is cold, intellectual, a con job. Stand in front of one for ten minutes and tell me that again. Rothko didn't paint ideas about emotion—he painted the thing itself, compressed into pigment and canvas until it vibrates. That rust isn't the color of rust; it's the feeling of rust, of decay, of something beautiful that's dying or something dying that's beautiful.

Walking through the Museum of Modern Art last Tuesday, I found myself stopped cold by Kandinsky's

Composition VII

. Not because I understood it—I didn't, not at first—but because the painting

Standing in front of Rothko's "Orange, Red, Yellow," I felt something break open inside me—not in a violent way, but like watching ice melt in spring. Three massive fields of color, bleeding into each other at their edges, and somehow they contain every sunset I've ever witnessed and every feeling I've never been able to name. This painting doesn't ask you to understand it. It asks you to

feel

it, to stand there long enough that your analytical mind gives up and something deeper takes over.