The studio waited two weeks to say anything. Kusama died on August 14 in a Tokyo hospital, and the announcement came on the 27th, by which point the obituaries had to be written at speed and all of them reached for the same nouns. Dots. Pumpkins. Mirrors. The red wig. Those are fine as far as they go. But the part of her career that changed other people’s institutions, rather than just her own prices, happened in a three-month window in Washington in 2017, and museums have been living inside the consequences ever since.