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I create a mockup to portray what the potential Instagram page would look like for the book/event, using the assets I have already created. I also included the '#EverydayThings' hashtag within the profile.

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The 'selfie area' will feature walls and props with a bright colour scheme (Museum of Ice Cream)

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The pop-up location will feature a table of books, in addition to shelves showcasing the rest of the Penguin series available to buy. (Louis Vuitton pop-up store)

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I created a series of stickers intended to be decorated on the wall of the pop-up store - this would also be a free gift for the visitors.

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I created a poster using elements from the book cover, which is intended to be on display around Manchester and nearby the location itself. I also created a hashtag '#EverydayThings" intended for visitors to tag this in their posts.

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Target audience: younger people who have an appreciation for art + design - a new direction for the books

Embossed with a spot UV finish on the titles

No colour on the page ends as I wanted to still keep a mature feel following the academic subject matter.

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I illustrated what I imagine the pop-up location to look like - using the Penguin name, I imagine this to be in a city and would feature an area with the series of books on display to purchase, while the visitors then can also take photos in the photo areas.

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I put the two side-by-side to envision what they would look like next to each other.

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For the first 'selfie area', I used props from the cover of 'The Beauty of Everyday Things' which help link to the meaning of the book - to appreciate everyday objects, this time in an aesthetically pleasing way appropriate for sharing on social media (linking to the young target audience). The book itself is also on the table, which in turn further promotes the series.

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For the second 'selfie area', I used the mirrors and flower featured on the cover, while also sticking to the same colour scheme as the book. By using an arrangement of mirrors, this links to the book by allowing the visitors to capture the everyday object.

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I wanted to see how I could initially visualise how the 'selfie areas' could look, including props seen from the cover of 'The Beauty of Everyday Things' which also link to the theme of the book itself.

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I also visualised a room full of mirrors, an item seen of the cover of the book.

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Most cafe owners know it takes more than just great coffee to create a successful business. From an Instagram-worthy Wes Anderson-esque cafe in the Philippines to a coffee shop shaped like a Rolleiflex camera in South Korea, a space's design is key to drawing in customers. One cafe to have recently received hype for its novelty interior is Cafe Yeonnam-dong 239-20 in Seoul. The eatery created an incredible space that makes customers feel as though they've stepped into a cartoon world.

The artistic, monochrome design was inspired by Korea's hit TV show, by Lee Jong-suk and Han Hyo-joo, in which the characters clash between "two worlds"-the real world and a fantasy world inside a webtoon. The design of Cafe Yeonnam-dong 239-20 creates a 2D optical illusion, which makes customers feel as though they've crossed dimensions into a comic book illustration. When visitors step through the door, they're greeted with black and white comic strip furniture, walls, and floors. Even the mugs, dishes, and cutlery look like flat line drawings.

If you want to experience this cafe for yourself, you can find it in the popular Yeonman-dong district in Seoul. If you can't make it to South Korea, you can still feed your wanderlust by checking out the cafe's Instagram.

The interior of Cafe Yeonnam-dong 239-20 in Seoul, South Korea makes customers feel as though they've stepped into a cartoon world.

The incredible space features black and white comic-strip furniture, walls, and floors.

Even the mugs, dishes, and cutlery look like flat line drawings.

Cafe Yeonnam-dong 239-20: Facebook | Instagram
h/t: [ Design You Trust]

All images via Cafe Yeonnam-dong 239-20.

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This Korean Café Makes Visitors Feel Like They've Stepped Into a Cartoon

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The interior of Cafe Yeonnam-dong 239-20 in Seoul, South Korea makes customers feel as though they've stepped into a cartoon world. The incredible space features black and white comic-strip furniture, walls, and floors. Even the mugs, dishes, and cutlery look like flat line drawings.

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The furniture in the cafe gives the illusion of a cartoon, giving a paper-like effect causing the cafe to become popular on social media - because the illustrations on my covers are also 2d, this is something I could incorporate within the pop-up location.

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Photo based pop up locations can become extremely popular on social media - perfect for a younger audience

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Millennials used to seeking out the perfect selfie moment are hungry for cultural experiences that also afford them the opportunity to take great pictures for their Instagram feed. Although some may scoff at the idea of this self-centred approach, it really misses the point. Instagram has changed the cultural landscape and pop-up museums have embraced this phenomenon with enthusiasm.

That does not mean that there is no place for more traditional museums, of course. What it does mean is that museum professionals have to learn from what Instagram friendly pop-up cultural experiences are offering visitors.

Emphatically, it is not about aping what is going on elsewhere or pandering to millennials. Such an approach would inevitably be patronising and fail in the end. Rather, what the pop-up phenomenon can teach us is that to get people to engage with museum collections, the public will increasingly expect novelty and innovation.

So, it is not a question of lowering expectations or playing to a public with an ever-decreasing attention span. It is more about offering something enticing that gets people talking and sharing online instead. After all, social media is the new word-of-mouth.

What Is a Pop-Up Museum?

Before we go any further, it is worth noting exactly what a pop-up museum is and what it is not. Essentially, a pop-up will be set up for a limited period of time in a location where no museum has really operated before. The curation of such a museum is also important but the key to it is the novelty of the presentation. If museum curators think that they can ride on the coattails of a successful pop-up museum and copy it at their establishment, then the lack of originality is likely to doom it to failure.

The time-limited aspect should not be overlooked, either. Part of what the Instagram generation are after is a unique - or, at least, limited - experience that feels vital. This is a crucial part of how the excitement is generated that leads to the buzz surrounding a successful pop-up museum. If one can be visited at any time, then there is necessarily less of a social media frenzy, even if one is generated at all. That's why they need to both pop up and disappear.

Indeed, the location of a pop-up museum plays a big part, as well. Why? Essentially, the location could be anywhere so long as it is reasonably easy to reach. That said, the setting will ideally promote a thought process in itself. Just like public art that might be installed in an unconventional setting, so a pop-up museum ought to make a statement as well as reflecting on its surroundings. This dialogue can prove to be a big strength for a pop-up museum, especially if, of course, the setting also affords visitors some Instagram-friendly moments.

A Pop-Up Museum Case Study

When it first opened its doors in July 2016, the Museum of Ice Cream was already counting down the days until it closed. The interactive art exhibition was based on ice cream and other types of confection in a way that asked visitors to think about food and colour in novel ways. Co-founded by Maryellis Bunn, the museum contained a number of rooms with differing themes and colour palettes. Crucially, Bunn put plenty of focus on creating moments for the Instagram generation.

In fact, many of the arty exhibits were not simply there to be viewed and contemplated but actively encouraged visitors to take selfies with the works as colourful backdrops. Thousands of selfies were taken during the short time the museum was open in New York, posted to the most popular visual social media networks, such as Facebook, Flickr and Instagram. Since then, the museum has popped up in Los Angeles, Miami and San Francisco with the same selfie-taking effect. It has been visited by around half a million people thus far.

Of course, highlighting the success of a pop-up museum that built its audience through social media may seem like it is not that remarkable. For every successful pop-up museum, like the Museum of Ice Cream, it would be perfectly possible to point out another which did not achieve the same level of interest. The point about this particular venture was not that it snowballed so much as the fact that it was a hit from day one. The museum sold 30,000 tickets to attendees over the course of its first five days. Social media had made it a success before it even opened because it was marketed there on a tiny budget.

The Winning Formula?

Any museum professional who is thinking about how the case study of the Museum of Ice Cream might be applied to their own establishment needs to realise that there is no true blueprint for success on this scale. It is more a question of understanding the psychology of what visitors, at least some of them, are after these days. A pop-up museum might be an art installation, like the Museum of Ice Cream, but it could also be a travelling display highlighting a bigger exhibition at a permanent museum. It could offer a tactile or an immersive experience or a passive one, such as a video presentation. Live or interactive elements may feature but, there again, they may not.

What is required is novelty, a temporary sense of 'blink and you will miss it' and, most importantly of all, the opportunity to harness social media to drive awareness of it. Generally speaking, social media has become more and more based on the visual as opposed to the written, especially when it comes to documenting cultural experiences. As such, your approach must offer something enticing, visually speaking, ideally with that selfie-friendly moment that so many Instagrammers long for. Let's put it this way - if people are willing to take photos of their meals out and share them, then they will definitely do so for anything of cultural experiential worth.

Harnessing the Power of Social Media Imagery

Now we have established the basic pop-up rules for museum curators to follow, it is important to focus on how museums can harness social media. Pop-up experiences like Happy Place, based in Los Angeles, have a social media profile of their own which are used to promote themselves. Set up by a live entertainment producer, Happy Place is an immersive pop-up experience that is designed to help visitors to escape from their normal life pressures for a brief moment and to experience inner happiness. It has in the region of 150,000 social media followers in its own right. Of course, given the wider outreach that social media platforms offer, more and more people see Happy Place tagged into posts and comments than its own followers alone, widening its circulation.

Happy Place is not alone. Happy-Go-Lucky was a similar pop-up experience-based museum which ran for a short time in New York. It, too, had thousands of followers even before it got going in earnest. Should it pop-up again in another form or another city, then these followers will be notified immediately. Wndr Museum offered visitors a much more traditional experience than Happy-Go-Lucky or Happy Place despite its undoubted playfulness and the number of selfie-friendly moments it afforded. Like all good pop-ups, Wndr Museum did not merely rely on word-of-mouth virality to spread as visitors started to post their selfies. The Chicago-based museum built its own social media profile with judicious use of hash-tagging and shared pictures.

If the pop-up museum trend has anything to teach traditional gallery and museum establishments, then it surely is that social media should not be taken lightly. Building a strong social media presence may become even more of the lifeblood of visitor numbers in the future. It is a crowded marketplace, too, so gaining a toehold now may well save unnecessary marketing efforts down the line. In this, a pop-up approach to museum curation can be incredibly powerful. It builds a museum's brand and helps the public to understand - potentially, at least - what makes one establishment distinct from another.

Mobile Culture Builds Further Interest

Although the idea of a pop-up museum may seem like it is the equivalent of a fast-food experience when a gourmet meal is on offer, the fact is that some people need to try a sample before they will commit to a fine dining experience. This idea of offering taster museum experiences has certainly not been lost on the museum professionals at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Here, the powers-that-be commissioned an architect to create a travelling museum structure for them which could pop-up anywhere they wanted. Patrick Bouchain designed a flexible space that could be used for all sorts of different exhibitions and that, crucially, would generate interest wherever it went.

The Pompidou pop-up concept was developed in order to show off certain highlights of the main exhibition space in the capital. With a footprint of just 650 square metres to play with the mobile museum has already been set up in several cities around France. The idea was that the temporary exhibition would engage people who might never dream of visiting Paris, let alone the Pompidou Centre itself. In this regard, it has been an undoubted success. The pop-up concept continues to operate throughout the country and a further pop-up Pompidou Centre has now been established in southern Spain, internationalising the approach.

Is a Pop-Up Museum a Real Museum?

This is a question that is reasonable to demand an answer to. After all, some of the so-called pop-up museum spaces that you could cite, offer a visitor experience that is a million miles away from some of the established cultural centres in the major cities of the world.

That said, any museum or gallery ought to make visitors feel as if they have experienced something, be it wonder, awe or excitement.

Essentially, a pop-up museum will put a much greater weight on the visceral aspects of visitor experience as opposed to intellectual ones. However, this is a difference of emphasis and not the concept of the museum itself.

The Pompidou pop-up concept proves this. Essentially, it is a miniaturised version of the main centre. Importantly, this does not diminish what the Pompidou Centre in Paris offers, nor does it trivialise the experience for visitors to the pop-up version. If curated successfully, both will complement one another.

However, the question of whether a pop-up museum is a real one becomes a little more nuanced in the case of another concept pioneered in France, that of Micro-Folie.

More properly described as a digital museum than a pop-up one, Micro-Folie occupies a permanent space. However, the content on offer changes regularly so it could be said to have many of the same properties of a pop-up.

The concept is to provide digital access to some of the great museum establishments of Paris. Without having to fight through crowds or dash between different buildings in the heart of the capital, visitors can experience them via virtual reality technology.

Because it is located the outskirts of Paris, near to an airport, it offers the chance to enjoy some of Paris' cultural highlights without needing to travel in. The Louvre, the Picasso National Museum and the Pompidou Centre all provide content which is shared in the digital museum.

The point is just the same as the mobile Pompidou Centre - to build interest among an audience which may not ever make it to the real thing. Bear in mind that this may not simply be down to time constraints which might restrict international visitors in their ability to visit a city centre.

It also serves to assist members of the public with additional social needs or, perhaps, who have mobility issues which prevent them from attending in person gaining an authentic cultural experience.

Altering Public Perceptions and Driving Conversations

A pop-up museum which stands alone can make people think in new ways. If it combines a clever juxtaposition of content and location, then this may come about in a perfectly natural way.

However, pop-up museum concepts can also start to drive conversations about their focus simply because they get people involved who are not traditional gallery or museum-goers.

When a pop-up museum curates hash-taggable content and selfie-friendly images, then the conversation does not restrict itself to attendees alone and it can begin to have an impact on wider public discourse due to social media posts.

If a museum has a responsibility to the wider public, including those who never attend them, then it is surely to inform. Part of that public education role, surely, is to re-contextualise and help people to think about often serious subject matter in new ways.

In Frankfurt, for example, the Jewish Museum decided to create a pop-up museum on a boat on the Main River in the heart of the city. The exhibition gave Jewish perspectives on modern Germany but putting this on a boat also allowed for ideas about refugees and the historic movement of people to be discussed.

A similar approach to opening up a public debate was seen when the Tate Gallery in London created its own pop-up museum outside of its usual gallery space. Staged over the course of the summer in 2018, the lawn that runs around the museum was converted into a pop-up community garden.

With the title of A Common Ground, the idea was to invite people to enjoy the experience of the garden - and the gallery, of course - but also to ask questions about the traditional, semi-public realm spaces around institutions and what they are really for.

In Summary

The pop-up museum isn't an existential threat to the traditional museum. Treated well, they can enhance visitor experiences and mean that a traditional museum exceeds its audience's expectations.

The temporary nature of a pop-up museum is not an indication of their lack of value, rather the reverse.

A pop-up museum may make the public reimagine what a museum is. If so, then it should also make museum professionals ask themselves similarly philosophical questions.

If you want to drive the conversation about your museum or the subject to which it is devoted, then a pop-up concept could be a great way of engaging the public. It can be converted into pop-up exhibitions, experiences, performance artworks or just about anything else cultural you could care to name.

Crucially, the pop-up concept is something that the younger audiences feel they can engage in. In some cases, they feel like they 'own' the concept - that it is theirs and theirs alone. Sure, curating a selfie-friendly pop-up museum may mean that you have to leave out so much more content that you would ideally like to include.

Remember that the idea is that a pop-up museum is a mere taster of what is to come and should be thought of accordingly. In other words, the pop-up concept is not in competition to traditional establishments but a valuable ally of it.

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What we can learn from Pop-Up Museums? Best practice and ideas from Instagram friendly experiences

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Millennials used to seeking out the perfect selfie moment are hungry for cultural experiences that also afford them the opportunity to take great pictures for their Instagram feed. Although some may scoff at the idea of this self-centred approach, it really misses the point.

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When the Museum of Ice Cream opened in New York in 2016, it was more a temporary curiosity than a rival to, say, the Whitney Museum of American Art, which stood just across the street. The walls were painted a soft shade of millennial pink. In one room, ice cream cones hung like pendant lights. There was a giant ice cream sandwich swing. And a sprinkle pool. Even the museum's co-founders, Maryellis Bunn and Manish Vora, often wore some shade of bubblegum pink around the museum as if they, too, were on display.

One year and three cities later, the Museum of Ice Cream has graduated to cult status on Instagram. More than 241,000 people follow its page, and countless more have posted their own photos from within the space. (Instagram doesn't show how many photos have been posted at a particular geotag, but there are over 66,000 images with the #museumoficecream hashtag.) All those grams have made the Museum of Ice Cream a coveted place to be: In New York, the $18 tickets to visit-300,000 in total-sold within five days of opening. At its San Francisco location, which opened this month, single tickets went up to $38. The entire six-month run sold out in less than 90 minutes.

Bunn denies that Instagram played a significant role in how she shaped the museum. "I don't think that social is what is driving what the Museum of Ice Cream does," she says. Yet it's hard to walk through the space and imagine it as anything but a series of Instagram backdrops. One room in the San Francisco space is filled with giant cherries and marshmallow clouds; in LA, there's a room with strings of pink and yellow bananas strewn from the ceiling. Visitors are allotted about 90 minutes to explore the museum, but it's hard to imagine what you'd do during that time if you weren't taking photos.

Bunn, who is 25, seems to understand the appeal of a well-styled Instagram photo. Her personal feed includes photos of her snorkeling in Hawaii and suspended in a hammock above turquoise water in the Maldives, as well as many photos of Bunn inside her museum, hula hooping in the sprinkle room or licking an ice cream cone while sitting on a white unicorn. So while maybe the goal of the Museum of Ice Cream really is bigger than Instagram alone, there is no denying that social media plays a major role in its success. And in the rise of other installations like it-ones that offer just the right lighting, the right backdrops, and the right amount of whimsy, all for the price of admission.

Art in the Age of Instagram

If "made-for-Instagram" exhibits suggests something about our selfie-dominated culture, it didn't start in places like the Museum of Ice Cream. It started on the internet and then spilled out everywhere else- in nature, in restaurants, even in the contemporary art world.

In 2015, the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian opened Wonder, an immersive art experience featuring nine contemporary artists. One room featured a prismatic rainbow made from 60 miles of thread; another room was wallpapered with dead insects; in another, 10 towers of index cards stacked and glued together loomed over visitors like volcanic rock formations. The exhibit, for those who experienced it, was bizarre, beautiful, and at times bewildering. It was also Instagram gold.

Wonder became famous on social media, bringing more visitors to the Renwick during the show's six-week run than the museum had seen in a year. And the Renwick embraced it, posting signs encouraging visitors to take photos. Curator Nicholas Bell told the Washington Post at the time: "We're all flabbergasted, to be frank. I wonder, what are they even trying to say? 'I am here Instagramming?' It's like this new first-person narrative of the museum experience. I'm fascinated."

This was three years after the Rain Room opened at London's Barbican Center. The installation-a curtain of rain that paused when someone walked beneath it, as if to control the elements-would later travel to New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and all over the world. But the place that the Rain Room has remained the longest is on Instagram, where there are thousands of photos of it.

"The world has seen an increase in these spectacle exhibitions that have really taken on a new dimension online," says Jia Jia Fei, Director of Digital at the Jewish Museum of New York, who delivered a TED Talk last year on Art in the Age of Instagram. "When you think of the very Instagrammable exhibitions of the last five years-the course in which Instagram has existed-you think of Yayoi Kusama and her Infinity Mirrored Room [...] and then artists like James Turrell or the Rain Room at MoMA. These are artists who really have very critical bodies of work, but [created installations] that have taken on new meaning because of social media."

The Rain Room wasn't designed for social media, but its raving success online demonstrated a hunger for these types of exhibits. In some cities, people waited in line for as long as eight hours for their chance to get a photo inside. To some, it proved there was a market waiting to be served.

"I was noticing that exhibitions like Yayoi Kusama's 'Fireflies on the Water' were all of a sudden garnering these big crowds," says Piera Gelardi, the Executive Creative Director and co-founder of digital media brand Refinery29. "I thought that was an interesting opportunity for us to expose people to new types of artwork and concepts, but also create a space in which they could kind of be the star of the show."

This year marks the third year of Refinery 29's pop-up installation space, 29Rooms, in New York. (The exhibit will make its way to Los Angeles this winter; tickets, ranging from $19 to $85, have already sold out.) The exhibit features things like a human snow globe and a "cloud pool" made from blocks of blue foam, spread throughout 29 themed rooms.

Like Bunn, Gelardi says the purpose of the installation is not exclusively to take Instagram photos. Some of the rooms delve into deeper themes, like body image and gender, rather than merely providing a photo opp. But she also knows that part of the reason people come to 29 Rooms is to take pictures, and, she says, that's an equally important part of the experience.

"We thought first about the experience IRL that people would have, and what interaction could take place in each room. And then we thought also about: What was the photo moment? How could we create this in a way that people could come in and really be the star of the space?" says Gelardi.

"I go to SF MoMA and everyone's just trying to get Instagrams. Is that what art is becoming?" - Jordan Ferney, creator of the Color Factory

Half a mile from the Museum of Ice Cream, you can find the Color Factory, a 12,000-square foot space containing 15 interactive color "experiences." In one room, a menagerie of cheese puffs, goldfish, and measuring levels create an orange tableau. In another, a bright yellow ball pit invites visitors to jump in and play. Perhaps most iconic, there's the confetti room, where tiny squares of colorful paper blanket the room like fresh snow.

Jordan Ferney, the Color Factory's creator, makes her living on the internet, running a popular lifestyle blog called Oh Happy Day. It's best known for its whimsical, colorful DIY creations on social media-so it's hardly surprising that Ferney's museum space looks more or less like the set for her own Instagram feed.

"We kind of said, 'Oh, well, wouldn't it be fun to get a bunch of artists and creatives together and kind of do this color experience?" says Ferney. "I wanted [the Color Factory] to be something that you normally didn't get to experience, whether that's laying underneath 100 pounds of confetti falling down on you or walking through a room full of ribbons."

In designing the Color Factory, Ferney knew each room had to look just as good in photos as it did in person. It had to be fun to visit, too, but if you didn't like the photos you took there-well, then what was the point? "There were a few decisions we had to make," she says. "Like, even with the lighting, where maybe a warmer light would have felt better to be there but a whiter light looks better on Instagram."

Ferney says the desire to experience a place through selfies goes far beyond the spaces she and others have created. "I go to SF MoMA and everyone's just trying to get Instagrams," says Ferney. "Is that what art is becoming-what you're experiencing and sending out into the world?"

To visit a museum in the 21st century is not just to see art, but to document and replicate it. "Not only are they taking pictures of art, but they're taking pictures of themselves within these spaces," Fei said in her TED Talk. "In the pre-digital photography era, the message was: This is what I'm seeing. I have seen. Today, the message was: I was there. I came, I saw, and I selfied."

Is It Art?

Where, though, do we draw the line between art and Instagram filler? What separates the monochromatic paintings of the avant-garde movement, like Ad Reinhardt's series of square, black canvases, from a room devoted to the color blue in Ferney's Color Factory? To someone without a robust sense of art history, why does an exhibition like the National Building Museum's "Beach," a 10,000 square-foot installation featuring deck chairs and umbrellas set up amid one million white plastic balls, belongs in a category apart from the Color Factory's yellow ball pit?

"There's a question: Is this art? I'm not going to be the one to say it's art," says Ferney. "We brought on a lot of talented artists to work on this."

To others, the line is less blurry. "These manufactured entertainments aren't significant art exhibitions any more than a Chuck E. Cheese arcade or the Block of Fame at Legoland," says Christopher Knight, an art critic for the Los Angeles Times. "They're just snobbier."

"Artists like Sol LeWitt also have, in their practice, very intricate colorful walls," says Fei. "Without that context, one might consider that to be as created for Instagram. But there's nuance in that artist's practice. It's about minimalism, and a period in time in which that work was created. If it's just an orange wall that exists as a backdrop, there's no meaning or value added to having that space there."

In the simplest terms, the goals of these spaces are different. Artists, and the museums that host their work, exist to provoke thought, ask questions, explore color, space, materials, and moods. And the aims of installations like the ones at Museum of Ice Cream are further complicated by commercialism. The New York version of the Museum of Ice Cream was supported by 30 corporate sponsors, including Dove, Fox, and Dylan's Candy Bar; in "Tinderland," a room sponsored by Tinder, visitors could sit on a see-saw ice cream scoop or an ice cream sandwich swing and use an app to find their "true flavor match." Seven of the 29 Rooms are sponsored by brands-including a runway sponsored by Aldo, where visitors can practice their model strut underneath an arch decorated with shoes. The degree to which these brands impact the experience differs by location, but the existence of brand sponsorships at all changes the meaning of these spaces, and the reason they exist at all.

Maybe the question is not whether or not these spaces contain art, or even what their relationship to social media says at all, but instead: What do we get out of these spaces? Do they make us think and reflect and see the world differently? Or does the experience inside amount to the little square photo you post online?

At the Museum of Ice Cream, at least, all it takes is scrolling through online reviews to get a sense of what people get out of it. People mostly like it-the San Francisco location has three stars out of five on Yelp. But the reviews also warn others not to go in expecting more than the museum can deliver. It all makes for a delightful scene in photos and videos, but in person, the rooms can feel somewhat one-dimensional, the whimsy can fall flat. "Definitely more hype than anything," wrote one reviewer. "Personally, I would save my money and just enjoy the pictures online."
Correction at 2:30 p.m. on 9/27/2017: An earlier version of this article misstated the opening date of the Museum of Ice Cream. Its New York location opened in the summer of 2016, not 2015.

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The Rise of the Made-for-Instagram Museum

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When the Museum of Ice Cream opened in New York in 2016, it was more a temporary curiosity than a rival to, say, the Whitney Museum of American Art, which stood just across the street. The walls were painted a soft shade of millennial pink. In one room, ice cream cones hung like pendant lights.

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Museum experience (locations both permanent and pop-up) with areas to take photos with to post on social media, inspired by ice cream. I particularly like the colour schemes and how minimal each area looks.

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Her installations have become popular particularly on instagram, because of how much her art stands out when photographed - particularly her infinity rooms, which create an out-of-this world effect.

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In the past five years, more than 5 million museum visitors have queued - and queued some more - for a brief glimpse of the work of Yayoi Kusama. The 89-year-old Japanese artist, who for the past 41 years has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric hospital, has had large-scale solo shows of her work in Mexico City, Rio, Seoul, Taiwan and Chile, as well as major touring exhibitions in the US and Europe. Last year, she opened her own five-storey gallery in Tokyo. The Broad museum in Los Angeles recently sold 90,000 $25 tickets in an afternoon to its Kusama exhibition, causing the LA Times to ask if the artist was now "Hotter than Hamilton?"

As the numbers have gone up, so the time that each visitor can spend in Kusama's installations - her immersive "infinity mirror rooms" of coloured lights, and painted pumpkins and polka dots that reflect for ever - has gone down. In 2013 the David Zwirner gallery in New York was restricting time slots to 45 seconds for each viewer. Five years on, visitors to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, who queued for more than two hours, were down to a brisk half a minute.

How did this happen? The most obvious single word answer is "Instagram". People - hundreds of thousands of them (see #YayoiKusama or #InfiniteKusama) - photograph themselves in Kusama's unique spacey wonderlands and share the results. Many modern art galleries are currently exploring the idea of exhibition as uploadable social media "experience". Kusama - in developing an idea she first presented in New York in 1966 - has already cornered the market.

This autumn sees more new work on display at the Victoria Miro gallery in London - only two years since its last open-all-hours event. The exhibition coincides with the UK release of a film about the artist's extraordinary life, Kusama: Infinity. The story of the making of the film is indicative of the ways Kusama's fortunes have soared. Its director, Heather Lenz, first tried to get the idea off the ground in 2001. She pitched the story to every production company she could think of and was told the same thing by all of them. Her idea was "too arty", Kusama had "no name recognition", and "no one wants to watch a movie about a woman artist". No longer.

Kusama boldly made the decision to leave Japan and go to New York while that was a pretty shocking thing to do.

Heather Lenz, director

Speaking on the phone last week, Lenz acknowledged that the smartphone-friendly nature of the work is clearly part of the attraction - but said that should only lead to a deeper understanding of Kusama's career.

"Most people have seen her work on Instagram," Lenz says, "but when they hear what she had to go through to achieve the success that eluded her for so long, they really connect with that. We did a few screenings and though most people knew the work, out of an entire audience only two people knew for example that she lived in a psychiatric hospital."

Lenz's film reveals how Kusama's life has been if anything more estranging than her obsessive work, and the ways in which one informs the other. It does it no harm as a tale of perseverance and triumph that it falls into neat chapters of Kusama's self-transformation.

In the first of these, Kusama's childhood, the curious seeds of the art world's favourite selfie-craze were sown. Kusama was born into a wealthy family in rural Japan that managed extensive plant nurseries, growing varieties of violets and peonies and zinnias to sell all over the country. From a very young age Kusama would carry her sketchbook down to the seed-harvesting grounds and sit among the flowers until, as in a fairytale - of the Grimm kind - one day she experienced the flowers crowding in and talking to her. "I had thought that only humans could speak, so I was surprised the violets were using words. I was so terrified my legs began shaking." This was the first of a series of disturbing hallucinations - she calls them depersonalisations - that haunted her childhood.

Those episodes seem to have been connected to the dislocations of her home life. Kusama grew up in a deeply unhappy family. Her father was a philanderer and her mother sent Kusama to spy on him with his mistresses, though when she reported back, she recalls in her autobiography, "my mother would vent all her rage on me".

Her mother tried to stop Kusama from painting - tearing the canvas from her hands and destroying it - insisting that she studied etiquette in order to make a good arranged marriage. Kusama kept on drawing. It was her way of making sense of her hallucinations: flowers from the tablecloth that enveloped her and chased her upstairs; sudden bursts of radiance in the sky. "Whenever things like this happened I would hurry back home and draw what I had seen in my sketchbook... recording them helped to ease the shock and fear of the episodes," she recalls.

Many of the motifs that have become her trademarks were, apparently, rooted in this practice. The first pumpkin Kusama saw was with her grandfather. When she went to pick it, it began speaking to her. It was the size of a man's head. She painted the pumpkin and won a prize for it, her first, aged 11. Eighty years on, her largest silver pumpkin sculptures sell for $500,000.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, when Kusama was 13, she was conscripted to work in a factory that produced fabrics for parachutes. In the evening, she painted intricate flowers over and over. The local paper, in a notice of her first exhibition, reported her producing 70 watercolours a day.

Seeing stills of Kusama's early life in Lenz's documentary - her hair cut straight across her forehead, photographed among flowers - makes a stark and moving contrast to footage of the artist at work in her studio now. The same slightly bulbous eyes peer out from under a red wig as she joins up her dots with a magic marker, chewing her lip like a child. "To me," Lenz says, "Kusama's childhood trauma was instrumental in her work not just because of her difficult family, but also because of her society and the nightmare of the second world war."

Lenz came to understand these pressures more keenly because while making the film she herself married into a Japanese family and learned the history of her husband's grandfather, killed by the bomb at Hiroshima, and her mother- and father-in-law who had an arranged marriage. "That gave me a greater understanding of her childhood," she says. "The expectations of the time for a young lady, an arranged marriage, kids. Kusama boldly made the decision to leave Japan and go to New York while that was a pretty shocking thing to do."

That second chapter of Kusama's journey began when she first encountered the work of Georgia O'Keeffe in a bookshop in Matsumoto, her home town. She found O'Keeffe's address in New Mexico and wrote to her for advice about how she could make her way in the New York art world, sending some of her own intricate watercolours of surreal vegetal forms and exploding seed pods. O'Keeffe replied, puzzled at first why anyone, let alone a young woman in rural Japan, might want to do such a thing, but the curiosity developed over several years to a kind of mentorship. "In this country an artist has a hard time making a living," O'Keeffe replied. "You will just have to find your way as best you can."

Yayoi Kusama at an artistic "happening" in New York's Central Park in 1969. Photograph: New York Daily News Archive/Getty Images

Kusama arrived in New York in 1958, aged 27, with a few hundred dollars sewn into the lining of her dresses, along with 60 silk kimonos and some drawings. Her plan was to survive by selling one or the other.

In her own account, she subsisted initially on scraps of food including fish heads scavenged from the fishmonger's rubbish, which she boiled for soup. She trailed her work around the city. "One day," she recalls in her autobiography, "I carried a canvas taller than myself 40 blocks through the streets of Manhattan to submit it for consideration at the Whitney Annual. My painting was not selected and I had to carry it 40 blocks back again. The wind was blowing hard that day and more than once it seemed as if the canvas would sail up into the air, taking me with it. When I got home I was so exhausted I slept like the dead for two days."

Her breakthrough works, the Infinity Net paintings, emerged from an earlier series of watercolours entitled Pacific Ocean, which she had made in response to watching the tracery of waves on the surface of the sea when she had flown for the first time from Tokyo. The nets she painted were made from a repetitive singular gesture of impasto in little loops, like interlocking scales; the longest canvases measured 30ft. One of these canvases sold in 2014 for $7.1m, a record for a living female artist. The first ones she sold to fellow artists Frank Stella and Donald Judd in 1962 for $75.

For a while, Judd and Kusama lived in the same building on 19th Street in Manhattan. "She would sit around my apartment and talk, or I'd go down there and we'd talk," Judd recalled in an interview in 1988. "She'd work right through the night, as far as I could tell. Most paintings were done in one shot. I don't understand how she could do that, but she would start in a corner and then go across."

One of the startling things about watching Lenz's film is the way that Kusama seemed to be written out of pop art history. There was a point in the 60s when she shared almost equal billing - and notoriety - with the likes of Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg. Part of this eclipse seems to have been by design - Kusama has long claimed that her original ideas were appropriated by the Wasp-ish men around her and passed off as their own.

In 1963 she started making chairs and other objects covered, fungi-like, with white painted phallic forms made of stuffed fabric; her pièce de résistance was a rowing boat, complete with oars, that she and Judd rescued from a junkyard. It was presented in a box-like space, the walls, ceiling and floor of which were papered with 999 silk-screen images of the phallic boat. She saw it as her own private aversion therapy.

A waxwork figure of Yayoi Kusama at Madame Tussauds, Hong Kong. Photograph: VCG/Getty Images

"I began making penises in order to heal my feelings of disgust toward sex," she later wrote. "My fear was of the hide-in-the-closet-trembling variety. I was taught sex was dirty, shameful, something to be hidden. Complicating things even more was all the talk about 'good families' and 'arranged marriage' and the absolute opposition to romantic love... Also, I happened to witness the sex act when I was a toddler and the fear that entered through my eye had ballooned inside me."

There is a grim irony in this act of therapy in that her technique of "soft sculpture" appears to have been adopted by Oldenburg, and her repetitive wallpaper prints by Warhol. She despaired at the way the men around her found fame with her ideas.

Lenz's film seeks to expose that appropriation. "Every single Q&A I do I get a question about how much the allegations that these white male artists stole her ideas were true," Lenz says. "Obviously I checked all the dates and they all work out as she said. People who had degrees in art history still challenged this though; it was as if they don't want to shift their views. They know what they know, I guess."

Kusama found something like her ideal man in Joseph Cornell, the reclusive genius of the outsider art world, maker of surreal boxes of found objects, and a man who, then in his 50s, had always lived with his mother. Cornell became obsessed with Kusama, sending her a dozen poems a day, never hanging up from a phone call so he was there when she picked it up to dial. This was her only known romantic relationship, though "he didn't like sex, and I didn't like sex so we didn't have sex". He wasn't an easy man. One time she was at Cornell's house and they were sitting on the lawn. Cornell's mother appeared, struggling up the garden with a large bucket of water. She tipped the contents over them, at which Cornell clung to his mother's skirt and pleaded with her: "Mother! I'm sorry! Forgive me, but this person is my lover, please do not do such outrageous things."

After that episode Kusama cooled somewhat. She began her first experiments with mirrored infinity, in an octagonal room filled with stuffed phalluses, and became so depressed that on one occasion she jumped from her studio window (her fall was broken by a bicycle).

She lost herself in other ways as the 1960s progressed. For one piece in 1966 she walked though some of the rougher neighbourhoods of the city, dressed in full Japanese national costume: kimono, white painted face, her plaited hair fixed with flowers and carrying an ornate parasol. The odyssey is captured in photos. Partly Kusama wanted to present herself as an outsider. Partly she wanted to project her singular identity as far and wide as she could (she had a Warhol-esque mania for fame). She hijacked the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966 with Narcissus Garden, a lake of 1,500 reflective balls in which the viewer's face was infinitely multiplied. She sold the balls for $2 each, "your narcissism for sale" read the ad, a gesture that foretold the artwork as selfie. The Biennale authorities stopped the performance, objecting to "selling art like hot dogs or ice-cream cones".

When the summer of love arrived, Kusama sought to position herself as a kind of high priestess of flower power, staging "Body Festivals" and "Anatomic Explosion happenings" in which she painted naked partygoers with polka dots. She took these happenings to sites around New York - opposite the New York Stock Exchange, on the steps of the Statue of Liberty - creating nude protests against the election of Richard Nixon and the Vietnam war. Jeanette Hart, one of her dancers in these performances, recalls how she first heard about Kusama from a friend, who said the artist would let Hart stay at her studio for nothing if she could paint her. "I was thinking 'portrait'," Hart remembers. "It never occurred to me that it meant literally 'paint me'." Kusama's happenings appeared on the front page of the Daily News twice in one year: "Nudies dance on Wall St and the cops don't pinch 'em."

A scene from Heather Lenz's new documentary, Kusama: Infinity. Photograph: Dogwoof films

On 25 November 1968 she staged - half a century ahead of its time - New York's first "homosexual wedding", for which she had created a "wedding dress for two". She sold polka dot fashion designs from a boutique, with holes to reveal breasts and buttocks, which cemented her notoriety not only in America but also in her native - and deeply conservative - Japan. She was the scandalous exile. Media interest in her work had shifted from serious critical attention to exposés in the tabloids where her name became synonymous with skin painting and orgies.

As the 70s backlash against 60s excesses began, and having become something of an outcast in New York, Kusama returned to Japan. She was deeply affected by the death of Joseph Cornell in 1972, and by her father two years later. She rented an apartment on the 10th floor of a tower block in Shinjuku, Tokyo, overlooking a large cemetery, and began to work on an elegy to Cornell in surreal collages. The hallucinations and panic attacks of her adolescence returned with full force, however, and she was hospitalised several times. In Lenz's film there is some footage from an art project that saw Kusama alone in a park in the city, submerged under a seething pile of silk, unable to escape. In March 1977 she admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital.

For some artists this might have been the end of things, but for Kusama it represented a new start. She found a way to manage her mania, and direct it toward her creativity. The hospital offered art therapy courses. She signed up, and never left.

Kusama does not do interviews, but in the course of researching this story I was invited to ask her three questions about her curious life by email. What do you say? This businesslike exchange went as follows: "Was the enormous recognition you have received relatively late in your career a surprise to you? Did you ever lose faith in it happening?"

"Long ago," Kusama wrote back, "I decided that all I could do was express my thoughts through my art and that I would continue to do this until I died, even if no one was ever to see my work. Today, I never forget that my artworks have moved millions of people all around the world."

What have been the advantages for you of living in a psychiatric hospital? How has it informed your practice as an artist?

"It made it possible for me to continue to make art every day, and this has saved my life."

How do you habitually begin your days in the studio? And how do you end them?

"I have been painting, drawing and writing from morning until night every day since I was a child. When I arrive at my studio in the morning, I put on my work clothes and start to paint straight away, and I work right up until dinner time. I don't rest. I am an insomniac. Even now, if an idea comes to me in the middle of the night, I pick up my sketchbook and draw."

Heather Lenz asked to film at Kusama's hospital but it was not possible, out of respect for the other patients. Having had this brief exchange with Kusama, I wondered what Lenz made of her curious regime?

"I think it was her choice - and that is in no way to belittle any of her traumas or her medical conditions. If you think about it, she had found this location where she was looked after and there was art therapy and it was close to her studio. She wanted to spend her time making her art - and here was a situation where she didn't have to worry about washing her sheets or cleaning the bathroom or cooking. It is not a bad arrangement. If you look at the history of art, a lot of successful men have had wives or servants do that for them also."

Kusama sleeps at the hospital each night and works in her studio across the road six days a week. She eats sushi from the local supermarket. She makes her own clothes. She apparently has little interest in the wealth that has come to her late in life. She has a small team of assistants in her studio, and gallerists who look after her interests in New York, Tokyo and London. Glenn Scott Wright, co-director at Victoria Miro, is one of them.

Visitors at Kusama's Kusamatrix exhibition in Tokyo, 2004. Photograph: Junko Kimura/Getty Images

Scott Wright recalls how he first saw Kusama's art at Modern Art Oxford in 1989. "I just walked in not knowing much about her and thought 'these are absolutely amazing'." He sought out more of her work at an exhibition at the CICA museum in New York later that year, the start of Kusama's triumphant resurrection in the city, curated by Alexandra Munroe. The first time Scott Wright encountered her in person was at the 1993 Venice Biennale, when she was granted the whole Japanese pavilion. He has watched her star slowly rise over the past 25 years.

"We had an Infinity Mirror Room at the first Victoria Miro show at Cork Street [in 1998] and practically no one came. The last show we had 80,000 visitors."

One reason for this success, he believes, is the need to make amends in some way for the fact that Kusama was never taken up by the art establishment like her male contemporaries. "She was doubly an outsider - a woman, and a Japanese woman. She just wasn't recognised in the way the white male artists were. In retrospect it is clear she was a very important figure both in minimalism and in pop art. Her work provided a link between the two, which was unique."

As well as that, he argues, Kusama has achieved the rare double of serious critical attention and immense popularity. "At the same time as the Tate retrospective was happening in 2012, including all this wonderful work from the 1950s and 1960s, she was launching a fashion range with Louis Vuitton, perhaps the biggest art and fashion collaboration ever, with thousands of shop windows. I think the nature of her work is that it has always had the capacity for universal appeal. Even from the early shows you could observe people of all ages opening up to it with a real sense of wonder."

Scott Wright goes to see Kusama regularly in Tokyo, probably three times a year. Generally the artist is painting when he arrives at the studio and he waits to let her finish before they discuss any business.

"She paints on a flat surface and sits in a chair, but she will get up and move around," he says. "She is not much interested in hearing art world gossip, she wants to talk about her own work."

I wonder how changed she is by success?

"She doesn't talk about it so much, but she says she always wanted Kusama to be everywhere, so she appreciates that."

The internet has granted Kusama that wish in ways she could not have imagined when she was sitting in her field of peonies as a girl. "I am determined to create Kusama world, which no one has ever done and trodden into," she once wrote. As a student of narcissism she would perhaps have been amused to hear that one visitor to All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins recently took that desire literally when he stumbled into and shattered a pumpkin while trying to capture a self-portrait in a mirror.
Yayoi Kusama: There will be a private view for readers of the Observer (the Guardian's Sunday sister paper) on 14 Nov. Details of how to apply for tickets will be published in the Observer next month The Moving Moment When I Went To The Universe, is at Victoria Miro gallery, London N1, 3 Oct-21 Dec. Free timed tickets: victoria-miro.com. Kusama: Infinity, is in cinemas/on demand from 5 October.

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Yayoi Kusama: the world's favourite artist?

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After spending the past four decades in a psychiatric hospital, her name written out of art history, Yayoi Kusama became an art-world phenomenon in the age of the selfie

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I decided to research into the idea of a 'selfie pop-up location' further and found many real life examples

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The rise of selfie museums | Design and Architecture

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Coming in January, you’ll be able to buy tickets to the Museum of Selfies in Glendale. It’s part of the trend this past year of “made-for-Instagram” museums, collections of colorful sets designed for taking flattering self-portraits.

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Wanting to focus on 'The Beauty of Everyday Things', I brainstormed ideas - the two standing out the most to me being the selfie pop-up locations and creating household items. However, I feel as though the photo location idea links better to the new target audience of younger people while also relating more to the theme of the book.

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When remaking the back covers, I wanted to create more of a 'scene' rather than using a simple shape - this includes a continuation of the camera film as seen on the front cover, as well as a photography backdrop where the blurb will fit.

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When making the second back design, I changed the colour to orange to match with the front cover better and I instantly feel this works better and has more impact, while also leaving room for the blurb.

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I began by creating the film design using illustrator- while I like this outcome, I don't think it is as effective as I imagined and feels too simple.

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For the final design, I decided to change the new mirror to landscape, which then allowed the 'of' to fit better into the space and makes the type look more in place.

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I then made the main illustrations larger, while also changing the location of the type to the side - while I feel this turned out successfully, I feel the type being central is more impactful and is what I'm more drawn to.

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Starting with the Beauty of Everyday Things, I added another mirror to the cover in order to have less emphasis on the big mirror, which in turn allowed me to put the 'of' in a more central place.

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- Try different layouts for 'The Beauty of Everyday Things', also test a different coloured barcode
- Try to create a scene for 'On Photography' on the back cover (remove the stars)
- Make barcode smaller
- Change font width on spine
- Find more ideas for part 2

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I decided to print the covers to see what they would look like physically - I feel as though this turned out successfully, as well as giving an insight into how the covers would look if I were to create the books using the correct ink and how they look as a set together.

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Using the book 'Stressed, Unstressed' we made the two words in different styles to reflect the meaning - our 'unstressed' meant to look calming featuring pastel colours and a rounded type.

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To make the word 'stressed' we wanted to reflect the emotion in how we made it (as shown in the video), in addition to scribbling and using harsh looking letters with muted colours.

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I found it fun and helpful to not only create something physically - as I usually only work digitally - but to also work with gif making too. I feel as though our final result turned out successfully despite it being something new.

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When making the back cover, I wanted to continue the images shown on the front cover in addition to giving some context into the contents (show by the addition of a quote + blurb). I also created a two-toned effect which separates the two sections of type.

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I decided to make the background beige in order to emphasise the coloured illustrations, which I think worked successfully, as well as continuing the bright playful colour scheme.

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Following the theme of the book, to appreciate the spaces and places we grew up and how our environment can affect us, I decided to create a scene including a house isolated within a circle, emphasising how important the 'space' is.

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A new idea for the cover - including a more visual representation of photography

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I created the scene I drew on Illustrator, turning it into vector images

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After slightly altering the placement of text, I tested the layout using my chosen colour scheme - however, it felt incomplete and not as impactful as expected so I decided to try a more illustrative approach.

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Making my other two covers, I wanted to add continuity with both the colour scheme, art style and use of fonts - in addition to creating a 'scene' with a more literal interpretation of the meaning

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after adding the title, I made different colour variations - the middle is the one that stands out to me the most

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Using Illustrator I created vector art in the same style as my other cover, including a camera and camera film, as well as a star to represent not only the flash of a camera, but also the impact that photos can have - linking to the theme of the book.

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Using the same layout as the pervious cover, I added the spine and blurb while also including another star shape, further linking to the theme and book as a whole.

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After making small changes (e.g. removing the stars and changing font weights), I added the back cover and spine - I wanted to make the back cover more simple while using an item from the front cover.

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I then added type, this time using NaN Fiasco which felt as though it worked a lot better, as well as adding stars in the corners - however I don't think the stars add too much

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I added colour to the vector drawings which I feel worked successfully, in addition to appealing to a younger audience.

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Using illustrator I began creating vector art instead of using a more hand-drawn feel, as this would suit the playful covers more and match the colour scheme well.

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To begin I used one of my thumbnail ideas with the same font, and a 'flash' illustration in the same style

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I especially found the workshop useful in learning skills in illustrator, and I in particular found the use of grids helpful when placing objects in a specific area as I was unsure on how to do this before.

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I found the workshop helpful as it introduced me to many new fonts, in addition to a new understanding on how licensing works.

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Using the illustrations I created I made a first test - however I don't think this was too successful because of the colour scheme not being very impactful, as well as the font not being the right fit

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After this, I searched for different fonts that I thought may work for my covers - my favourites are Temeraire and NaN Fiasco, which have a bold yet funky look to them that I want to portray on my covers to add a playful side.

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I wanted to test using my own photograph with a monochrome colour scheme for a more retro feel - I feel the photo matches the font well, however this isn't the direction I want to take my final covers and would prefer something more illustrative.

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After this I used coolors.com to find new colours - this is where I realised a more playful and bright colour scheme would work better, while also still using calming colours like blue and cream. This also allowed for a new, younger target audience

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Using a flat colour illustration style, I made some images using procreate inspired by 'mingei' to test on the cover

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I also wanted to test using a gradient with calming colours, as well as an image of a house - I feel as though this turned out successfully, however it didn't stand out to me as much as I expected.

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To match the gradient 'Poetics of Space' design, I tested the colours with sparkle icons to match the theme of the book -while I feel it turned out successfully, I feel it would need more work if it were to become the full cover as it seems empty.

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Incorporating the concept of 'mingei', I made new thumbnails using the items I researched following my initial thumbnails and illustrations.

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Because I wanted to also test a vector art style with outlines, I created a sketch on how I want the items to specifically look making it easier to create the final thing.

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I found it helpful to test different ways in that a specific typeface can be used while sticking to a limited colour palette, which made a fun challenge.