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.

A museum guide stands in front of Arearea and points. The group behind her looks where she directs them. This is how most people encounter Gauguin — mediated, framed, explained. The painting on the wall at the Musée d’Orsay is one of the most reproduced images in the Western canon: two Tahitian women seated in a lush landscape, a red dog in the foreground, the color saturated to a pitch that has no equivalent in European painting before it.