People Are Scalping Tickets to the ICA Boston’s Yayoi Kusama Exhibition

When there’s a big game or a hot concert, it’s not uncommon to
see internet sites like StubHub and Craigslist flooded with
entrepreneurial scalpers re-selling batches of tickets for inflated
prices. It’s rare for a museum show though. Yet this is exactly
what is happening for ICA Boston’s current show, “Yayoi Kusama: Love is
Calling.”

The exhibition, which opened on September 24, features the
largest museum-owned Infinity Room in North America, also
titled LOVE IS CALLING, a dark cavernous room
with polka-dotted tentacles sprouting from the ground and ceiling.
Demand to get a glimpse has driven the internet wild.

Tickets sold through the museum cost $15. Those currently listed
on StubHub, however, start at
$18, with most priced at around $20, with about three weeks worth
of tickets listed with multiple time slots offered for up to nine
tickets. Not a bad payday for someone gaming the system.

The show is technically already sold out through October 31.
ICA’s communications director Margaux Leonard told the Boston
Globe that the museum had been blindsided by the situation.
She also said that it was taking unnamed steps to make sure the
scalping didn’t happen again when the next batches of tickets are
released later this month (members get a shot on October 8; the
general public, on the 15th).

Meanwhile, the ICA was guaranteeing a limited number
of first-come, first-served tickets for those frozen out of
the opening weeks.

Long lines, both online and real life, have long been
characteristic of Kusama’s Infinity Room works, which have proved
perfect for the smartphone generation. At one point, over
100,000 people were waiting in a virtual line for passes to the
Broad Museum’s Kusama show last year, which sold out in a
flash.

Indeed, scalpers have dogged Kusama shows for
years now. Prices for resold passes to the Art Gallery of Ontario’s
Kusama show on StubHub soared to as high as a
reported $250 apiece, despite the fact that the museum warned
that all tickets were non-transferable.

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